Blog Love: The Greener Side
I LOVE LOVE LOVE, even … dare I say it … WUV the Greener Side’s post on how our consumerist habits are fueling credit-card debt—the only people really getting their jollies are the creditors, who of course want you “cracked out on consumer debt.”
On top of that, your personally unsustainable lifestyle has global ramifications. The road to easy credit is littered with landfills. When you instantly gratify a whim by charging the latest, most incredibly shrinking iPod or whatever, you feed the myth that newness is better than something borrowed or mended. The annoying cycle of mass consumption that we all bitch about but participate in keeps spinning like some fractal screensaver in a stoner’s dorm room.
You spend more because you can, you save less because you can’t imagine the future, and soon there’s less cash in your kitty. You may no longer use credit cards just to keep up with the Joneses; falling incomes and rising debt mean that you’re charging basics like gas, health care, and groceries. Creditors often gouge the neediest consumers with outlandish interest rates, trapping them in this cycle.
Elsa also links to a fascinating article in The Nation about young couples who can’t afford to have children, which reminds me of that episode of Stargate SG-1 where this race of aliens wants to be all BFF with us, but are quietly plotting our extinction by using an “anti-aging vaccine” as a Trojan horse for turning all of Earth’s population sterile.
So it finally clicked into place. I totally get what my childhood nightmares were trying to tell me all along: Credit-card and student-loan companies, with their wide, flashing grins, are really aliens IN DISGUISE and they’re pushing credit cards onto naive college kids, and encouraging them to get mired in credit-card debt, as a slow-but-steady CULLING MEASURE. Sallie Mae? More like Sallie M-AN-ALIEN. Ha ha, I’m totally on to you now, alien scum, I’m going to use my tax return to buy nothing.
Rage against the consumer capitalist machine.
For the love of Tom and Katie’s L. Ron Hubbard-loving fetus, don’t let the aliens win.
elsamary said,
April 10, 2006 at 8:11 pm
teee heee. cracking up at work! thanks for the link. but be careful what you write; they might beam you up…ha
Laurie said,
April 12, 2006 at 8:33 am
Last year around this time, my husband was offered a decent job after three years of looking and crappy part-time and temp jobs. I ran into my mentor at the farmer’s market and told him the good news. “Now I am REALLY tempted to go out and buy, buy, buy,” I said. He stood back, looked me in the eye, and said, “Remember, George Bush wants you to buy stuff.” That’s why he’s my mentor.
The Worsted Witch » Maybe Baby said,
May 9, 2006 at 11:18 pm
[...] This deeply personal post by Daily Green, about his and his wife’s difficulties conceiving a child, only reaffirms my belief that corporations are fronts for aliens who are systematically wiping out the human race by steadily curtailing our fertility. [...]