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1 September, 2001
Consumption: disease old and new

It is September, and, since St. Albert is a wealthy and respectable community, many people are heading to university or college. Other people will be making a case against post-secondary education. Why spend all the money, time, and stress on school when it puts you no farther ahead, fiscally speaking? Ask your dentist, lawyer, MP, or doctor. They will have plenty of dollar signs to spell out a reason to go to school. But do not ask a historian, writer, musician, activist, sociologist, linguist, or anthropologist. All they will be able to tell you about is the forces, decisions, and events that shaped and shape today's society.

Speaking of shaping today's society, have you heard the word "meme"? A meme is a packet of cultural information, such as technologies, songs, beliefs, fads, political ideas, or philosophies, that pass through a population like a gene through a species. Strong memes, like a religion, create foundations. Stronger memes, like Darwinism, shake foundations. Naturally, in today's "day and age", whoever has the memes has the power.

This column is not about a calendar holiday, a pet bylaw, or a recent local event. But if you think it is not about something which affects you every day, you are wrong. If you suspect that you are bombarded by memes with the same message thousands of times a day which affect you in exactly the same way as they affect people in every country on the planet, you are right. If you suspect that that is bad, you are right again.

Across the planet, everyone but the most traditional aboriginals is told to consume. Every civilized human is told that consumption is virtuous. This is world culture, and it affects all of us. Come up with a list of ten memes that you experience on a daily basis which do not tell you to consume. Watch television, listen to the radio, eavesdrop on the bus, read a magazine, talk to your parents, peers, teachers, get any information from any current source, actively seek out any information which does not in some way encourage consumption. Then consider the extent to which that information affects your daily activities, and the activities of those around you.

I know it is unfashionable to be upset with the way the things are. But the same people that made outrage, no matter how civil, unfashionable are the same people that made neon clothing unfashionable, and that make allegiance to a particular cola more fashionable than media literacy.

I am not fashionable, and I see that a culture of consumption is bad because we are all being programmed to be locusts. I have never heard of locusts referred to as anything but a disaster. Contrary to Hollywood's message, disaster is not glamourous. It is bad. We will devour this planet, then devour each other, unless we come up with a way to think that is better than what the media tell us.

Even the "news" in the media is corrupt, because if news affects the advertisers negatively, the advertisers will not pay the newspaper. Thus most newspapers opt to be just papers. Money drives everything, including the information upon which we base our perception of our world. Very few people control all the newspapers, TV stations, magazines, and movie theatres on this continent. Read Can't Buy My Love by Jean Kilbourne or Media Virus by Douglas Rushkoff.

Perhaps this does not affect you, just one little person minding your own business. After all, the humiliation of failing a cola taste test is a small price to pay for something to believe in.

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