television, cars, and cigarettes

In my travels through babylon over the last 10 months I have been surprised (perhaps naively) to find the prevalent usage of three items among progressively minded individuals: television, cigarettes, and cars.

Of the three, television, specifically cable or satellite television, is the least prevalent and its usage pretty much ends when you get further left then liberal on the political spectrum. Still, I find it surprising. Doesn't everyone not totally enmeshed in mainstream values recognize the destructiveness of network programing and commercials? I feel the desire to rant, but I'll stop myself because I'm pretty sure that any reasonably intelligent person, if they think about, can list ten reasons why television is a highly toxic element in society.

But, really, it's cigarettes and cars that shock me. Saying the health impacts of cigarettes are well known is an understatement. Millions of dollars of been spent in education campaigns, and millions more have been paid out in successful lawsuits against the tobacco industry. The existence of global climate change isn't even in debate in the mainstream public dialog at this point, only how quickly it's happening. And with every oil company expelled from Iraqi thirty years ago recently given no-bid contracts to set up shop with the Iraqi national oil infrastructure has yet to recover, it's pretty hard to argue that the war in Iraqi was for democracy and against terrorism. Again, I'll stop there. Everyone knows!

What gives? Why are you doing this to ourselves? How do we justify participating in these incredibly destructive activities? It's not like it's just somewhere on the other side of the world that the impacts are felt. It's all around us, it's in our minds and bodies! How is it possible that multitudes of otherwise caring, thoughtful, intelligent people are helping wreak havoc on the health of the world?

If humanity makes it through the next few hundred years without devolving into a tyrannical, pre-medieval society, or avoids simply wiping itself out all together, I believe it will be because there was some miraculous, large-scale shift in consciousness that motivated people to pull together and create a better world. In the history books, children will read about, as Marge Piercy calls it in her book Woman On The Edge of Time, the "age of greed and waste." They'll look at pictures of obese, haggard, sickly people inhaling toxic smoke, staring glassy eyed at an overwhelming barrage of mind-numbing images, and operating massively inefficient, energy intensive personal transportation devices while people around the world suffered and died from starvation, malnutrition, inadequate access to safe drinking water, environmental pollution, curable diseases, war and genocide...

The children will be asked, "what do you think drove these people to engage in these activities?" What will the answer be? Maybe we should start asking that question of ourselves and each other right now.