Wayside_Wisdom Heard Along the Way
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REFUGEES
Auto dealers, furniture stores, personal injury lawyers, banks, loan companies, cosmetic companies and their anti-aging compounds, dog food companies, drug companies, grocery stores, hardware stores, department stores and their latest sales, personal products and gimmicks all find their way into our home uninvited. Then they proceed to abuse our civility by increasing the volume of their sales pitch that ranges from presumptuous through stupid to downright offensive. Surely, I think, as I try to tune out those commercials, there must be a better basis upon which to build a society than consumerism. Most of us have accumulated so much stuff we don’t know what to do with it all. Many of us have to rent locker space in which to store some of it, or, worse yet, build a bigger house to hold it all. Possessions, like rabbits, multiply and the urge to accumulate stuff becomes a subtle addiction fed by hours of print and media advertising. On the TV news in the evening we often see pictures of persons caught in situations of political chaos or the violence of warfare. Often to save their lives, safeguard their families, or preserve valuable freedoms they must grab the few belongings they can carry and flee from their homes. They have become refugees, forced to leave their community or their country and travel in search of a place of safety and refuge. It is the nature of warfare to uproot civilians, sending them running for their lives. They flee into neighboring nations or places of hiding within their own homeland. Political upheavals, too, can create refugees. Thousands of European citizens of Jewish ancestry became refugees from countries overrun by Hitler’s Third Reich. Boatloads of Cubans sought refuge outside of their homeland when Fidel Castro assumed political leadership of their island nation. I thank God daily that I cannot personally identify with the terrors of warfare or political chaos. I have not faced the loss of vital freedoms nor had to fear for my physical safety. But I am deeply troubled by the spiritual threat of drowning in the sea of materialism that is sweeping over my nation. Have goods become a powerful new god? Is buying stuff more important than building relationships? Fueled by advertising, accumulation is replacing character and driving us all into both spiritual and financial poverty. Perhaps that is why we’ve chosen our current unconventional lifestyle. Carrying only what we need, we are fleeing the tyranny of things in our native country of clutter. Instead, we are seeking the way of wisdom to the land of learning. We’ve traded luxury linens for language lessons; a second car for bicycles; sterling silver for symphony tickets; haute couture for hikes in the woods; watching bank accounts for watching birds; a big screen TV for books and more books; electronic gadgets for eloquent solitude. You see, we are refugees; refugees from materialism! 7/9/2010 - mshr
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Nearly
every morning, over our breakfast coffee, we watch one of the TV network
news programs. We enjoy beginning the day knowing the latest news and many
of the interviews give us interesting and valuable insights. As we watch,
however, we are bombarded with scores of commercials for products we
neither need nor want.