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job. Try to sell them on a Toyota Prius and they'll laugh at you. It isn't that they don't want the car or can't appreciate getting 40 miles per gallon. It's that they do not want to pay the taxes on that car and couldn't afford the repairs. That is the real reason why tricked out vehicles from the early eighties are status symbols in the hood. That slave mentality where you try to make the best of where you're at with what you know, which isn't much.

A lot of individuals are trying their best to make better consumer choices in their own mind. But it still isn't chic to do so in our culture. We still want acres of land, the biggest and best houses and cars that money can buy and no interference from the government whatsoever. The irony of which is that we'll listen to the lies that the biggest corporations have to offer as to why we should buy from them.

Every now and again we'll watch a documentary about how our choices make it possible for a corporation to privatize the basic essentials in some other third world country and it will give us pause. We buy bottled water because we want to not because we have to. We'll watch something on PBS about how schools are privatized in Philadelphia because the city is near bankruptcy and think twice about Coke or Pepsi machines in the cafeteria. But then we'll forget all about it and go back to Starbucks or Dairy Queen to buy something fake all over again.

The bottom line is that there isn't any money in selling Americans who do not like to think for themselves real stuff. Something that is real is expensive, cost prohibitive and doesn't offer the profits that diluting a product does so corporations continue to sell junk to us. We haven't had something real in decades and wouldn't know how to act if we were ever to get ahold of it. When is the last time you bought a real shirt that was really made in America without slave labor in China in a classic design that wasn't trendy? You probably paid $120 bucks for it, but why do that when you can get something cheap from Old Navy or Target?

Americans would want $15 an hour to sew those clothes together, but would have the unmitigated gall to balk at the price that the company was charging for it to make a profit. Yet we continue to buy overpriced sneakers for $300 that are made in some remote part of the world for $15 a month. Cheap materials, cheap values & disposable style.

Consumers do need to speak up but not with their mouth but with their wallets. Show these corporations that you aren't going to settle for less and that you want something real and tangible for a change, not the junk you have been buying. Computers that never work, cars that fall apart after 150,000 miles and clothing that was manufactured by a robot somewhere. We don't need it anymore. We want better, to help our environment repair itself and because we are should show the rest of the world that we are that number one society that we claim to be. Everyone else in every other part of the world finds humor in our aspirations because you couldn't sell that junk to them over there. We're still trying to market a dream to the rest of society, and some do come over here to partake of it. Yet those with a simple lifestyle absent of all of the "stuff" that we need over here understand something it takes most Americans their entire lifetime to comprehend.

Learn more about this author, Christopher Kendalls.
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