I’m just back from an extensive tour around the United States and am left grappling with the unshakeable impression that I live in a world gone stark raving mad.
Look at the facts:
- The combined national economies of the poorest 48 countries are way below the assets of the three richest people in the world.
- One-fifth of the people in the world eke out an existence on a dollar or less a day, while a whole chunk of the rest suffer from symptoms of excess, like obesity (which affects 33% of Americans).
The world has to be declared mad, institutionalised and put into intensive care for emergency healing. Now.
It’s what some nations were trying to do at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Joburg. I remember wondering how President George W Bush was explaining the US’s lack of concern to his voters. After our brief immersion in American culture it became very clear.
Here’s the thing — his countrymen don’t know. Most of them are too deep in a trance. Yes, it’s a sweeping statement and there are exceptions. But I’m talking about the average American, almost any one of the 280-odd million folk who make up the “land of the free and home of the brave”.
Here’s where the hint of evil emerges — you feed them only what you want them to know. And a once-great nation of people is brainwashed into becoming a compliant herd of sheep-like, voracious consumers.
Seven weeks in the US translated into seven weeks of not knowing what was going on in the world. Sure, information is available to the dedicated world-watcher. But unless you go out and look for it, you’re only going to get news about the US.
That’s why most of my family and friends in the US knew nothing about the World Summit — even though it was under way as my husband and I boarded the plane for Chicago out of Johannesburg International.
I fully anticipated the US’s embarrassing position at the summit to be a hot topic of conversation at my birthday party in Cincinnati two nights later. Not so. In fact it hadn’t even impinged on their consciousness. And I wasn’t going to be the one to broach it. It seemed uncouth to talk about the US’s pivotal role in the destruction of our home while I nibbled on the snacks so kindly brought by my sister-in-law’s guests.
When I found myself standing in her kitchen at the end of the party scraping mountains of untouched food into the bin I couldn’t resist murmuring something about it paining me terribly, since I know the village I live next door to in Africa is in a daily battle to keep the kwashiorkor wolf from the door.
“I know. Waste in America is really terrible,” was the response of my fellow cleaner. “But what can you do about it, that’s the system here,” she said sadly, but categorically, and in closing.
I could suddenly see why, at first hand, Bush and his policies — while making unwelcome waves across the world — failed to create the smallest ripple in the consciousness of his people. Those who care feel locked in the system, unable to sustain even the smallest voice.
What do you do when a company as pervasive as Subway, serving billions of stuffed rolls a day across the US, has its staff handing out a great wedge of “napkins” with every roll. Do you carefully stack them in a cupboard to use later? No way — you’d need a spare garage to cope with them.
So you toss them, along with one-third of your uneaten Subway, in the bin. The sad thing is, it won’t take long before you do it without a backward glance. And so you become an active participant in the death of the planet — without even thinking about it.
Because you’ll almost certainly have a chunk of your vastly over-stuffed foot-long Subway to throw away. It will be overstuffed because it costs the same whether you have all of the 20 options crammed into your Subway or not. And who would buy a six-inch roll for $3,29 when a foot-long only costs $1,70 extra? So the choice you land up with is to get fat, or throw food away.
Which brings me to another way the evil of over-consumerism has insidiously bored its way into the mind of the US’s purchasing public. Its aggressive marketing system, funded by the over-rich multi-national corporations (MNCs), convinces you that it never pays to buy less.
More is more in the US. Buy one, it costs you $4. Buy a second one and you can have them both for $6,20. But if we can tempt you to make the massive saving of buying a dozen, you can have them all for $19,99. Obviously you would be a fool to buy one.
And so it comes to pass that 20% of the world’s population is stick thin, dying of starvation, Aids and preventable diseases … while the 20% at the other end of the scale is eating up 80% of the world’s resources, commanding most of its money, and dying of obesity, cancer, heart disease, diabetes and strokes.
What’s thrown in “trash cans” across the US daily could make the difference between empty pot bellies and healthy bodies across great swathes of Africa.
Those obese Americans, girding their considerable loins to challenge fast-food giants to hold them liable for their condition, are barking up the wrong tree.
They should be banding together with all their fellow citizens, lobbying government to overhaul the runaway marketing machine that fuels the problem. For marketers have virtual carte blanche in the US.
Even governments cannot act against the interests of the MNCs and the international money industry out of fear of capital flight making a mockery of democracy. Farcical, isn’t it?
Aggression is an understatement for the way in which marketers in the US go about persuading consumers to over-consume. It’s a no-holds-barred affair.
They press you into applying for buying cards that give “massive savings” for store loyalty (read: penalise you if you don’t). Sell you a brand-new motor vehicle that you don’t have to pay any interest on or even make any payments on for more than a year. Then when all the chickens come home to roost and you find that your monthly earnings are swallowed by the 15 stores’ charge cards and the car payments that you’d long-since forgotten, why, then there’s the debt consolidator who can just magic all those nightmares away. Now you only have one creditor. Who keeps you in his grip beyond the end of your days, extracting your final sum owed plus 30 years’ interest accumulated from the scraps you’d otherwise have had to offer your heirs.
No wonder Americans work long hours and companies generally only offer two weeks’ leave a year. Small wonder they don’t travel overseas in their droves — by the time the American marketer is finished with you, there’s nothing left.
Which is exactly the way the MNCs would have it. The way the world’s economic system is currently set up depends massively on the over-consumptive habits of Americans. The irony that passes over the heads of these very consumers is that two-thirds of them face heightened risks of cancer because of exposure to toxins ingested in all the junk food they are forever stuffing down their throats.
That’s another crazy note in the discordant symphony; for all their efforts to protect their farmers and all their industrialisation and progress, American food tastes hollow.
Why is this? Mostly because of inappropriate land use and the perceived need for genetically modifying their produce. Another symptom of the madness.
Industrialised nations currently spend $360-billion annually on subsidising farmers, a sum recently inflated even further by Bush. The Financial Times recently reported that a European cow receives twice as much in subsidies as a Third World farmer makes in a year.
This was another sticking point at the summit — as the Third World begged, without success, for an entry in the world food-producing market.
This status quo serves the powers that be. Ditto the whole crazy issue of fossil fuels that is fuelling the US’s next war in the Middle East.
It is a case of the arms and the fossil-fuel industry sustaining each other.
Whatever their motives, even we found petrol cheap in the US, albeit our rand was 11 to the dollar at the time. Small wonder most of America ride around in gas-guzzling cars.
You see, that’s the thing. It’s there, it’s super-comfortable and super-easy, and so everyone just goes along with it. Even while the pundits are telling us that unless fossil-fuel use slows dramatically, the Earth’s average temperature could rise by 6 degrees C within the next 100 years. Which scientists agree spells disaster for all.
But the current economic model is driven by fossil fuels. Albeit suicidal. One morning in Phoenix we caught a Sky Couriers kombi to the airport. Our driver told us his van was kitted out to run off propane gas. It had already done well over 800 000km and looked set to do the same again. There’s almost no wear on the engine; your oil goes out the same way it came in, clean. Propane also has water as a by-product, cutting harmful emissions to zero. It costs about the same to run his kombi on propane gas as it would on petrol, he told us.
And yet his specially modified vehicle was probably less than one in a million of the cars on the highway that morning. It doesn’t suit anyone making policy decisions to usher out petrol-driven vehicles just yet.
But would Americans, given the chance to do something to make a difference, cooperate anyway? We flew by the rest of the traffic, ground to virtual standstill in the morning rush hour. That’s because we were in the seventh lane — the one that insists on more than one passenger. We had it virtually to ourselves.
That’s the really sad part. There are efforts being made, albeit by a small minority. My sister-in-law diligently recycles her paper, glass and plastics. She has a wonderfully efficient recycle company that collects on a regular basis.
It’s a documented fact that most materials in industrial nations are discarded after being used once only. Yet harmful emissions from factories are largely to blame for the fact that the 1990s were the hottest decade since measurements began in the 19th century. Sea levels have risen nearly 20cm in the past 100 years.
My friend Mary, in upstate New York, is also keenly aware of the ills of her society. She does all she can to prevent waste. But she despairs much of the time and feels like an inaudible voice being swept away in a hurricane of consumption.
She knows that the National Academy of Sciences in Washington warned that the consumption of forests, energy and land by humans now exceeds the rate at which the Earth can replenish itself. That it takes the Earth 1,2 years to regenerate what people remove every year. But she also knows that her fellow countrymen are too caught up in the American dream to wake up and smell the last vestiges of coffee as they drift out the window of opportunity forever.
Ever the optimist, I reminded her of the power of one. Consider that the cost of implementing the Millennium Development Goals (which aim to halve the world’s poverty by 2015) is between $50-billion and $100-billion a year. If the developed nations of the world had met their commitment from a decade ago — to provide 0,7% of their gross domestic product for development aid — we would have that amount and change every year.
But to get that to happen is going to take pressure from within. I have great hope. But then I come from a land where I witnessed at first hand how the will of the people prevails. And at this point in time the will of the American people to break out of their complacency and comfort-zone is clearly sadly lacking.
It seems, for now, that it’s up to the rest of the world to change first. Then drag them with us, kicking and screaming if needs be. Whoever suggested that South Africa should hold the American way of life up as a role model was caught up in the illusion so skilfully portrayed by the machine.
Let’s just make sure we all stay with the facts and do what we can in our lives to continue to lead the world into a new way of being that will sustain us into an indefinite future.
Athelé Wills is a Limpopo-based freelance journalist