We live in a society where excess is worshipped as success- that's capitalism. If you don't own a car or a television you're regarded as poor or an environmental crank. We live in a society where your caste is not determined by a dot on your forehead but the type of necktie you wear; where beauty is cosmetics tested on rabbits with their eyelids cut away with razor blades.

In Australia we have, once every two months a hard rubbish day. Hard rubbish days are when you take all the things that you can't normally put out for collection, your broken chairs, burnt saucepans, cracked mirrors and unwanted furniture and leave them on the curb for collection.

We had hard rubbish day in my area last week. Saturday morning I walked down my girlfriends street and saw mounds of computers (in one stack I counted eight C series Macs) CRT based televisions dumped because of the low price of plasma screens and the imagined belief that life will be better with a flatter screen, armchairs whose fabric was no longer the fashion.

None of this is unusual; I watched in interest as a young man, maybe twenty years old in worn drill cotton pants and beat up trainers and a dirty shirt stood for a moment, looking at a television set.

You could see on his face he was debating whether he should, whether he could pick at the excess of others. After a moment, the doubt on his face fled and he picked up a small television, one of those old black and white portable jobs and began to walk down the street with it- he obviously was in poverty, and the smile on his face said that for the first time in an age he was looking forward to watching television that night.

The screen door of the house opened and out stepped a bloated figure of a man, his belly straining the buttons of his shirt and his Nike slip ons flip-flopping as he waddled. "Come back here," the fat man roared, spit collecting on his lips and the anger flushing red through his cheeks, "Come back here, you can take that just because it's my rubbish," he roared. The young man turned and looked, his face awash with sudden fear, "Bring it back, or I'll call the cops," the fat man howled, too overweight to make it from the steps of his house.

In a society where the wealthy scream at the poor to bring their rubbish back it is impossible to say we are not drowning in excess and it is impossible to believe any good will come of this wallowing in materialism.

Learn more about this author, BT Cassidy.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.

---

Add your voice

Know something about Are we drowning in excess??
We want to hear your view. Write now!