Karl Marx = 19th Century fortune teller

"Owners of capital will stimulate the working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks, which will have to be nationalized, and the State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism." -- Karl Marx, Das Kapital, 1867


Someone sent this quotation to me last week and I thought, wow, eerie. Karl Marx's view of the world and it's economic development couldn't be more opposite from mine but to think that anyone, 140 years ago, could have predicted the state our country is in today, sent a chill down my spine. My suburban raised boyfriend thinks I am a broken record since I've been whining about the waste and consumerism religion that has taken over most of America for the past three years. When I visit his family and drive down the strip mall lined avenues or into the mega store parking lots or wonder through the mini-cities often called "malls", I feel sick and saddened. I grew up in Manhattan, the epi-center of consumer culture, luxury and excess so it seems nonsensical that my visits to "greener pastures" would leave me so sickened by our country's new set of values: Ipod + My Car x Sam's Club = happiness. However, the most sickening part to me isn't just that our country is obsessed with buying or playing everything, its that most don't ever realize they've been played. This culture of buying BIG and OFTEN that dominates most of the US was pressed upon them by brilliant corporations that saw that a suburb was a suburb was a suburb. The formula for a Sam's Club or a Walmart or a Chili's could fit easily into all of them with hardly a hiccup because like most their suburban locations, these chains lack distinctive character.

Character is what makes a place a place. Though New York City has more stores, restaurants and ways to spend money than almost any place on earth, most New Yorkers would not be caught dead eating at a Subway or going to a bedbathandbeyond. Though these places are often cheaper than many New York establishments and plentiful in our concrete grid, the neighborhood coffeeshop, pharmany and the established homeware shop are an invaluable part of each community. They give to what could be just any other city, a city with so much flavor it has become the most used film set in the entire world.

Walmart and Target saw that with the development of Suburban America came a lack of things to do with free time. It wasn't the country where skating on ponds, cross country skiing, fly fishing, riding horses and other such wholesome activities were easily accessible. And yet it wasn't a city where creative films, the theater, opera, ballet, concerts, events, museums, galleries and an endless supply of new restaurants and bars were at one's finger tips. No it was in some new grey area in between. A place with proximity to a major city, a patch of green grass for each house, tons of space for parking lots, closets so big they could fit a year's supply of paper towels, gas stations, good public schools and not much else. So, what better for the baby boomers to do than spend money they didn't have (thank you visa!) and waste gas they didn't own (thank you radical islamic dictatorships!) driving from chain store to chain store and most of all not doing, seeing, learning or experiencing hardly anything new or intellectually enriching.

Some people refer to this as the dumbing down of our society. Nowadays, people think the Discovery Channel is as educational as it gets and that learning stops when you graduate from college. And people wonder why we are falling fast behind India and China... but who really cares about all of that country progress nonsense when there is a Real World marathon allll weekend?!

Lets turn off the TV. Lets create towns again where you can walk to what you need or can take public transportation or ride a bike instead of just packed cities and suburban sprawl. Think of the weekends as a time to enrich your mind, not your credit card debt. Get out of the house. Laundry everyday? Once a week is just fine. Drive twenty minutes on a highway to a restaurant chain? Would you leave your refrigerator door open for 45 minutes? The baby boomer era exited last week with our first President born after the 1950's. Regardless of his politics, lets take that as a ready, set, go...and I don't mean drive.

*I commute to work in Westchester via cab, then train, then a car, have been to many Target-esque chains in my life, watch two hours of TV a week, and buy things with regularity. I'm getting there but am certainly still an excessive, wasteful American.