Monster of Overproduction

I know that economists are flailing about trying to find reasons for the financial collapse, but really, didn’t we all see this coming? When you drove past a new housing development and asked, “where are all these people coming from?” Or when storage facilities sprawled around freeway exits? Or when obesity became our country’s number one health problem? When you dressed up to go to the mall to buy clothes to dress up in?
The poet William Blake wrote in his Devil’s Proverbs that you can’t know when you’ve had enough until after you’ve had too much. Once, as a tourist in Amsterdam, I walked through the huge city park and found it filled with Amsterdam’s version of a yard sale. The lanes and pathways were filled from entrance to exit with heaps of used clothes. In New York City, on a Sunday afternoon, street vendors dump piles of new clothes on the sidewalks to be sold at a discount to anyone out for an afternoon stroll. Enough.
As I started to catalog our excesses of electronics, I realized this blog could not go on forever so let me skip over cars, vacation homes, recreational vehicles and I won’t think about what else so I can get to a larger problem. Technology made it possible to grow more food than is healthy for us, so now we torment ourselves with diets or medication. While overproduction of material items might bury our free time and space, overeating is burying us.
And don’t even get me started on what overproduction is doing to our environment.
Nancy Sherer