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Dec. 11, 2005 Christmas: The house is cluttered with empty boxes and gaudy wrapping paper, the credit card bill is crammed with unnecessary expenses and wasteful extravagances, parents under pressure are popping nerve pills and stomach medicines to go along with their favorite alcoholic beverages of choice, and children are hyperactive from too much electronic stimulation caused by modern high tech toys, while retail store executives are enjoying sex orgies with high class call girls in their new mansions and on their yachts both of which are paid for by me and you. We are stuck in an endless cycle of greed and materialism. It's the American way. It shouldn't be. Before buying something this Christmas season, ask yourself one question: Do we really need this new stuff? The other day my mother was straightening up a few rooms in our house. My wife is disabled, and sometimes she doesn't appreciate the quality of my house cleaning (you know, it's a man kept house. If the toilet doesn't stink yet, there's no need to clean it.), so she enlists the aid of my mom. My mom found a pile of my shirts that she felt should be thrown out or given to Good Will. "Those are some shirts I gave you when you were in college," she said. College was over twenty years ago, but hey, the shirts still fit. I keep in pretty good shape--the shirts fit as good now as they did then, if not better. They are nice and form fitting over my bulging middle age muscles, and I like to strut around the local gym fantasizing that nubile, young women working on their perky pecks find me attractive. Why would I throw away a perfectly good shirt? Why does my mom still buy me clothes for Christmas and birthdays when the clothes she's bought for me over the past two decades and a half serve the same adequate purpose? My late grandfather once showed me a closet where he kept all the sweaters he had received as gifts over about a fifty year period. Christmas after Christmas, some spawn of his loins had given him a sweater until he had accumulated a staggering number of them. So what did I get him for Christmas that year? Well, he didn't have a Georgia Bulldog sweater... When I first moved to Evans, Georgia in 1977 it was a nice, quiet suburb of Augusta. There were beautiful green forests and fields where the deer and raccoon and turkeys roamed wild and free. I remember a horse pasture that in the month of May would be covered with red and blue wildflowers. Now, it's a super Kroger parking lot. Evans was once a picturesque peaceful place to live, but it has transmogrified into one big shopping center surrounded by cookie cutter subdivisions consisting of houses packed together like sardines in a can and bisected by roads with twenty-four hour bumper to bumper traffic of gas guzzling SUV's driven by fat slobs whose bellies are full of greasy crud that is cruising through their blood streams and ready to cause a cardiac event resulting in an accident that will create yet another traffic jam making Evans a clone of Atlanta, a city that is nothing but one big traffic jam. On one side of the road are the Starbucks-Hardees-Die-in-Doughnut-psuedo-Mexican-mess-on-a-plate-greasy-spoon-chicken restaurants where these obese families can fuel up on bad cooking, and on the other side of the road are the Wal-martAll-Mart-Target-OldNavy-Dillards-cheaposhoes-slavemadeclothes-crookedcarlot-buyauselessshmuck stores where they can buy junk they don't need. Then these unhealthy money wasting zombies have to work extra hours for corporate overseers so they can at least partially break out of credit card debt as the extra work and stress brings on the next coronary that raises the cost of health insurance for all when the crooked incompetent doctors who make up the U.S. medical institution demand to be paid. All this can be avoided if you ask yourself that one question this Christmas season: Do we really need new stuff? ------------ About the author Mark Gelbart: My book, Talk Radio, is a black comedy about a radio talk show host who gets kidnapped and psychologically tortured by a loser. www.mark-gelbart.com Email: agelbart@aol.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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