by Doug Stowe

Created on: December 10, 2006   Last Updated: May 08, 2007

Are We Drowning In Excess?

To suggest that we - we being the western world - are merely drowning in excess, beggars the truth. The fact is, we have gone down for the last time and our collective bloated bodies are washing up on the polluted beaches of avarice. We need only look to the "television in the refrigerator door" or the i-Pod pillow, on which cosseted tweenies can rest their jaded heads and listen to their music, itself a paean to excessive want, need, violence and self-pity, to realize how repugnant we have become as consumers, to what degree we have indentured ourselves to faddist addiction. Concomitantly, we can observe how cynical the purveyors of consumables have become we'll buy anything that has the stamp of "cool" on it.

We are, for the most part, creatures without brakes, prone to addiction in its myriad forms. "Things" have become an anesthetic; getting and spending is one way to shore up our fears of mortality. We build a wall of materials around ourselves to divert our thoughts from the uncomfortable and the inevitable. Given a little extra disposable income, we will turn up for judgment day in chic clothes that barely constrain our obese bodies, camcorders and digital cameras around our necks, and try to wedge our Lexus into a motorcycle parking spot.

Yes, we have our wise men, our soothsayers, our Cassandras to warn us, but they are so easily trampled by the mass hysteria of a Doorbuster Sale. We have theological and philosophical templates galore reaching back to the ancients, but no animal is better than man at dichotomy of thought, at the ability to reconcile that extra serving of chocolate mousse with third world pleas for help.

Sadly, most of us, if we think of it at all, consider our privileged lives an entitlement. The opposite of want is contentment and that is a state of consciousness that no product driven society will allow. While physically overfed, we are kept emotionally hungry. The collateral damage of this social tug of war includes pollution, depletion of resources and the slow suicide of spiritual emptiness in all of its metaphorical forms.

A system, an ethos, a way of life becomes excessive when it creates and promulgates a state of moral and physical dis-ease.obesity, self possession to the exclusion of others, alienation and the most severe dereliction: the application of a class system worth by virtue of wealth; failure by measure of want.

Let's not castigate our western selves too thoroughly. The tendency to pursue

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