A lot of the aspects of society I find myself protesting these days are things that the majority of people (Americans) take for granted. They are accepted because that is what has been handed down to them.
Like work. The whole idea of selling your time and energy to someone else to be put towards someone else's goals and profit does not make sense to me. Maybe I'm valuing my individual free will a little too much, but why is selling a large portion of your life away any better than prostitution? Of course, a lucky minority actually enjoys their jobs and the time and energy they expend getting paid does still provide personal fulfillment (beyond pleasing your boss). But I wouldn't want to taint the pursuit of personal fulfillment through work with getting paid. If everyone was enabled to do what they really wanted to without the pursuit of money getting in the way, I wonder if money would still be necessary. I wonder if people would be more inclined to share their work, whatever it is, with others freely, knowing that someone would return the favor in some other way sometime. Just a utopian thought for the day.
And then today, when I arrived home from school, my mom was washing her car with my brother. She started to wash mine, too- just playfully, mostly to get me wet with the drifting mist of the spray. This is a very normal thing for people to do. It was a wonderful, hot day, and people wash their cars on the first warm day to come around. But I, with my knowledge of the very real shortage of water in many parts of the world, cringed at the wasted water. Cars do not need to be clean; there are no negative impacts from driving a dirty car (although my mom says that the paint lasts longer when it's clean). The US government subsidizes water so that the price paid by us customers is relatively cheap. And when something is cheap, there is no motivation to conserve it. Countries in Europe charge a lot more for their water, and they use less as a result. This may not seem like a good idea to you, but it most certainly sounds like a good idea to those areas in the world with no rivers, little percipitation, and a depleted aquifer (no water in the well).
I recently took an Ecological Footprint Quiz for my catholic social teaching class. With my current lifestyle of driving an old inefficient car alone and eating packaged food (and fruit shipped all the way from chile), I learned that if everyone lived as I do (even as a vegetarian), there would need to be 3.1 worlds to supply the demand. Well, I plan on tomorrow being the last day I drive my car in a while. I just switched my light bulb to one of the compact fluorescent variety (and the light doesn't look any harsher, by the way). I definitely want to start shopping at Soulard farmers' market before I even think about going to the supermarket. There will always be room for growth in this area, especially in our earthwrecking culture.
The idea that women need to shave their body hair is widely accepted as fact. This, despite the fact that it only became the fashion early to mid 20th century. It was a fashion! Those are supposed to be transient. But women have received the message that if they don't shave, they are (for some reason) ugly (in all their splendid naturalness). Of course, it could quite possibly just be a personal preference for some women, but if their actions are soley based on society's dictation of what is beautiful and what is not, then I don't think that is a healthy behavior. On the rare occasion that I see a woman with unshorn armpits, I am filled with respect for her confidence in her womanhood. Hair, after all, is a sign of maturity.
So those are just a few countercultural views I've been jonesin' to share for a while. It certainly has been a while (a month even?). There's something about the end of a school year that isn't conducive to blogging (see 2004 archives at this time of year for further proof). I believe I'm past the worst of it now. I guess we'll have to see what college brings to challenge the future of this blog. But that's not for another few months.
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