Let us give thanks to the homeless and destitute who post themselves at our corners. They remind us — 'tis the Season of Paradox. Thanksgiving's feast and Black Friday's harvest, when we stuff ourselves and permit stuff to consume us. We nominally observe tradition and genuflect to the Sacred Calf.
The ritual formula is deceptively simple. Ads offer objects for desires, desires we may not have known we had.
We convince ourselves these desires fit real needs. We buy stuff we didn't know we needed.
We then dispense gifts of stuff to family and friends as reimbursement for the time we spent working to buy this stuff instead of being with them.
Stuff acts as a moral palliative, our hydrocortisone to soothe the itch of guilt when conscience whispers to us the truth that there is no substitute for compassion, care, and love. Ask those suffering in Superstorm Sandy's' aftermath. Nature jolts our memory of what really matters.
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As Susan Brady in New York's hard-hit Belle Harbor tells Scott Pelley of "60 Minutes'' — "Family, friends and faith." All non-purchasable. Nonetheless, with Pavlovian fervor: stuff excites, we purchase, and we feel soothed. Until the next itch. Symptoms of consumer affliction are ubiquitous.
Here's a take-home exam: Compare the number of corporate brands with the number of plants and animals you can identify. Then ask your child.
To nurture our affliction, two reality shows collide — "Lifestyles of the Wannabe Rich and Famous" versus "Lifestyles of the Poor and Oppressed." The former wins high ratings as we dream of the "good life." The latter wouldn't last a season. It's too honest.
Our fantasies overtake realities we disregard, just as we pretend to not-see the Other at the corner.
In contrast, we peer at shelf items at our shopping malls. But even then we ignore their pre-shelf gestation. We look but do not see.
Do we see that our hip Nike and Converse sneakers could be made by abused female factory workers in Indonesia and Taiwan? That there's a likelihood the coltan in our cell-phones is mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo at the cost of population displacement, child labor and environmental ruin? That our Apple iPads come from Chinese factories where workers often face perilous conditions?
In truth, both lifestyles feed off the other. Each knows the Other exists. We wannabes, however, can look away.
Writes Margaret Atwood in her "Handmaid's Tale," "Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it." We choose to not see those at our corners in essence because they incarnate our uneasy condition of permanent transience.
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Says University of Leeds sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, "They remind us, on whose doors they knock, just how insecure our security is, how feeble and vulnerable our comfort, how poorly safeguarded our peace and quiet."
Corner people, however, are chained to stare at us. On our technologically, economically and politically interconnected planet, we cannot hide. The Other cannot not see us and what we have. This drives the nail further into their misery.
"Why should I care? What does it matter to me? The penniless will always be with us."
Through such rationalizations, my personal cosmology protects my personal ethics, my protective shield, which is in truth a delusion. I must upgrade my personal ethics in terms of a universal ontology of "we" and "us."
In which case, we who have the luxury of making choices to acquire further luxuries are not morally spotless. By allowing desires and "what's in it for me?" to consume us, we remain narcissistically impotent. Can we reconstruct our sense of who we are, not as an oxymoronic "we" in some gated community of sameness, but in terms of an all-embracing, diverse, universal union?
Here lies our redemption — the possibility of which this season is all about.
Michael Brannigan is the Pfaff Endowed Chair in Ethics and Moral Values at the College of Saint Rose. His email address is michael.brannigan@strose.edu.