I have finished the month of May successfully. As my last few post indicated I didn’t meet my goal of not purchasing anything extraneous. There are a variety of factors that led to this but most importantly I think is convenience. As The Dead Kennedy’s said “Give me convenience or give me death.” Culturally I don’t think there is much thought put into how much convenience shapes our internal and external lives.
The Industrial Revolution marched us straight into the suburbs and industrialized food distribution. Regardless of environmental and dietary impact aside, this is quite amazing. Compare my grandfather’s parents were stuck on a boat for weeks crossing the Atlantic to me wake up and eating banana’s from Ecuador that were brought up the coast in two days.
I digress, I’m not here to discuss the magic of supply chain management. No, question is: what are the effects of concentrated wealth? The birth of convenience in the ability to concentrate wealth (read: resources) in a particular place. The most visible effects are a degraded environment, fat people, and, although their is less physical evidence, an erosion of common ethics. I’ll leave the first two to your own observation dear reader.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, children aren’t starving by design or conspiracy. The culprit is the ability to ignore the problems that face us. It is a difficult decision to intentionally encounter things that make us uncomfortable. Even more so when that encounter shows us that we aren’t who we think we are.
Jung wrote quite extensively about this notion of our Shadow. The Shadow is the part of ourself that contains things we aren’t comfortable looking at, this isn’t necessarily only “bad” things. How funny that it is precisely the things that make us uncomfortable that we must overcome if we are to get anywhere in life.
Mythologist have long known that the tales of knights and dragons are wonderful parables of self-discovery. Our hero travels to defeat an immortal creature that hordes treasure. Or more to the point our hero goes to defeat something that has existed for everyone, everywhere for all of time, to gain the insights of doing such a thing.
Did I slay my dragon in my May? Probably not, but that battle has left me a little wiser for my next encounter.
Till next time kids,
N
I have met the enemy and he is us ~ Walt Kelly
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