Consumer - The Eight Letter Four Letter Word

I had the basics of a post planned out today (at least as far as my planning goes before I sit at the keyboard and let my fingers clarify my thoughts for me), when I went home for lunch and was talking to my daughter. It’s that time of her life when she has been getting a lot of brochures for college. More came in the mail today and she was reading them while we talked about the best way for her to pay for school.

You see, a lot of people won’t agree with me, and that’s okay, but my children have known since they were young that paying for college was up to them. One of the main reasons for this is I want them to value the education they get. People tend to value things more if they have to work for them. Knowledge that you haven’t earned for yourself you don’t value and is just candy that’s going to give you an upset stomach, rather than being nutritious food that will contribute to building and strengthening your mind and understanding of the world and yourself. I don’t think college should be a place to finish winning your independence from your parents, nor a place to earn a piece of paper to be able to get a job. It’s a place and time to study deeply something you care about, not a white collar trade school.

Anyway, she said she wanted to be a teacher. She has told me this before, and as before, I told her that was up to her. If that’s what she really wants to do, then she should. I don’t understand it, because I wouldn’t be able to tolerate it in many ways, and wouldn’t be very good at it, but that’s just me. She said she knew that, and understood I didn’t like stupid people. That floored me.

Granted, I get impatient with people who don’t see problems and solutions as quickly as I do, especially in an academic sense. I’m sure people who are more intelligent than me get impatient at how slow I can seem to be. That doesn’t make my impatience right, but that’s an entirely different thing than not liking people who seem to be less intelligent. What I dislike are people who don’t use what they know, who don’t try to learn something new, and who are content to sit back and vegetate while expecting things to be handed to them. Our children have been conditioned to believe that when they enter a classroom, it is the teacher’s responsibility to teach them, not their responsibility to learn. Whichever place you put the emphasis, the activities may be the same, but the locus of responsibility leads to two different outcomes, and two entirely different attitudes.

This attitude, unfortunately, is encouraged by society as a whole. From the time we get up, until the time we go to sleep, if we listen to the radio and television we are consumers. Consumer is one of the more vile words I can think of to apply to a human being. We consume breakfast. We consume music. We consume the news. We consume content (another vile word) on the internet. We consume oil. We consume retail items. We consume housing. We consume education. We are taught that our purpose in life is to be a spore in the economic ecology of the planet, with no real purpose than to consume, to ingest goods, services, art, and knowledge, and to excrete money and labor.

When you are a consumer you are depersonalized, objectified, and marginalized. It isn’t that I dislike stupid people. It is that I dislike consumers and the people who try to cast us in the role of consumers. You’re better than that. We’re better than that.

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