Consumers Anonymous
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Peter Martin
163 Bangladeshi?? That's the
equivalent per capita energy consumption of Americans, according to the Energy
Awareness display at the ASOSU Fall Earth Day event.
"We need to drive fuel-efficient
cars," I hear. "We can cut our electric bills 20% by turning things
off when we're not using them." Crap!
Fellow Consumers, we need to
fundamentally change ourselves so that our lives don't revolve around
consumption and waste. We don't need 12-step programs to allay nagging senses
of guilt; we don't need warm and fuzzy support groups to help us feel good
about ourselves. We need to bail out of the proud-to-be-American joyride toward
the brick wall, and voluntarily take new courses of thought, will, and action,
in the spirit of love of Earth and of all other people.
This is the Supercooperation
Imperative, which neither demands compliance nor depends on approval, but
springs from our instinct to do, to become, whatever is best for the whole. We
have to stop believing, reasoning, and acting after our habitual wants and our
ill-founded fears, turn it around, and let our wants follow the conviction to
cooperate.
Individually, our efforts are
trivialized by self-defeating ground rules. "I'd really like to carpool,
but I have to drive the kids to soccer." "Congratulations on the
birth of your new child!" Come on, people, let's not just question how we
do what we do, but what we do at all! Let's dig deep at our assumptions.
Question what's essential for health and happiness, and discover how
independent happiness is.
I read, "If just one American
life is saved by going to war with Iraq, it will be worth it," and
"If this dam (which will drown entire ecosystems) saves just one human
life, it will be worth it." Oh, baloney. Let's stop dividing the world
into what is sacred, unquestionable, and what is expendable, debatable.
Especially when we have reasoned after our wants and fears. We, like ideas,
don't exist in an empty field; the world is already filled with creation, and we
are both figure and ground. Rather like the cells of a comb, by our own
displacement we shape the cells and change the lives of our neighbors; and by
this reflection we change ourselves.
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