There are many of the world's people who have next to nothing. Literally millions of people in Africa have more children than items of clothing, eat maybe once in three days, have no concept of the Internet and will answer emphatically NO to the question of drowning in excess. There are millions of people in China and India who live in appalling circumstances barely recognisable as fit for humans. And even the so-called modern and civilised cities of the western world have slums and shanty towns where poverty is the norm and the only excess is garbage.

Not many of the people reading or writing on Helium will be able to identify with these circumstances. Most of them are probably at least middle-class and even higher on the socio-economic scale (after all, they have access to a computer). So let's forget for convenience's sake the poor of the world and concentrate on those levels of society that are more familiar.

Starting at the top, how many dollar billionaires are there? How many were there twenty years ago? Fifty years ago? Experts in economics calculate the wealth of famous historical royals and estimate that they had much more wealth than rich people today. The excesses of the French court and other European courts especially during the sixteen and seventeen hundreds have been well-documented but does that make the present society less indulging in excess?

The fact is that the percentage of people who could afford excess hundreds of years ago is many times smaller than the percentage of people who can do so today. So although there are millions of poor in the world, there is a hefty contingent of stinking rich and just plain rich people floating around. (Just open the pages of People and other mindless magazines to be informed in gory detail in issue after issue of the excesses of the rich and famous, the irony being that it is you and I who have made them rich and famous).

Today every conceivable consumer item is available in quantities that seem to be inexhaustible, especially if it is a manufactured item. Observe the trash heaps of the world, the scrapyards, the land fill sites and see how much we are throwing away because there is lots more where that came from. Walk into the gigantic retail shops like Macy's and WalMart and see how much there is of everything and people are buying, buying every day.

Now there is a financial crisis and suddenly the means to acquire stuff that nobody actually needs, as well as that which should keep a person alive, has disappeared. How now, the plasma TV screen? The house with a Jacuzzi in every bathroom? The six cars in the driveway? The Sony playstations? The list is endless. Now there are cries of agony and despair, but will people learn from this experience? No.

Learn more about this author, Santi Meintjes.
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