Finger pointing

It's Monday and the day I usually do some adjusting and assessing and thinking after the weekends social exchanges.

Why should fossil fuel companies stop providing the product
if we are going to keep paying them to produce it?
USE LESS or none at all.

In a discussion with a friend we were going over placing blame for the ills of society and the path that we seem to be on.

Do we blame the poor and undereducated for making bad choices, selfish choices driven by survival or by ignorance and lack of a broad perspective or long vision?

Do we blame the rich for greedy, and selfish choices and actions that mislead the masses and commender our governments, manufacture products that destroy our health and our environment, and our culture?

He seemed to polarize the choices between the Monstorous-powerful and the sheeplike-poor who are misled by the Mega rich corporations.

I tend to think that the real blame lies mostly elsewhere.

If lack of education is a real factor in the bad choices the poor make, then it is hard to blame them for something they are ignorant of.

If the Big corporations are choosing ethically challenging paths because it makes them more profit, then they are fulfilling their openly stated, in fact, legal obligation to make money for their share holders.

The Big corporations can't be making most of their money off of the poor, because the poor have no money.  So who is feeding them the money that is inspiring them to continue on as they do?

It is the middle class that does most of the spending.  It is the middle class that enjoys the benefits of education, credit, easy energy, capitalism.

How can we expect a large corporation to change their unethical practices  if they get their money from us without making any changes?  We'd have to stop giving them our money first in order to get them to really pay any attention.

If those of us who can somehow manage to get a bit of higher education, don't use it to actually become  educated, and thusly, thoughtful about our actions and our lives and the lives of our children, then what kind of education can we really be getting?

How can we make our donations to the many various charities and funds and environmental organizations, and then collect our "tote bags", "coffee mugs", bumper stickers and t shirts that all show what teams we want to be associated with, and then go on to act in ways that are completely contradictory to the stated ethos of those very same organizations, charities, funds and so forth?

What good is it to buy a brand new Hybrid car, and then drive it as much as you ever drove, if not more because you feel less guilty of contributing to the destruction of the environment?  Doesn't that new hybrid have to be manufactured, don't metals and plastics and chemicals have to be mined, and produced as well as the infrastructure that transports, advertises and finances the auto industry?

Who is less guilty of creating more stress on the resources of our planet, the person with 2 or 3 or 10 old gas guzzling cars sitting in his garage or yard, but who only drives one of them a few miles to and from work or grocery store using a few gallons of gas a week.........
or
The person who buys the brand new "green" car and drives it many, many miles and often and will replace it with in 5 years with a newer and possibly greener model, thus requiring all the industrial systems to stay in place producing, polluting and exploiting the planet?

Another friend tried to tell me that a person buying a used car still had an impact on the new car makers.  I suppose he is right but the affect the used car buyer has is against the need for new manufacturing.  That person is recycling a car.

It is most of us who can be called middle class and who most enjoy the lifestyle to which we have become accustom who finance the same destruction of our world that affects our life negatively.

At some point, we all need to realize that the idea of a new technology will solve our problems and make our world and future great, and also to realize that we just need to use and do and want LESS.

Our emptiness will not ever be filled with more stuff.

Just as salt water looks like the very thing the man dying of thirst needs, but only makes him more thirsty, our culture of consumerism and every increasing production are just deceptions.  We need to get out of our denial of the reality of the world in which we live.

The finger points back at me.  I just signed up with Facebook in order to keep up with family far away. The truth is that there has been the postal service and telephones and travel available to us to keep in touch for all of our lives.  But, they have been little used.  I don't believe that this social media will or change the situation much if any.  The problem though is that I am now part of the reason that a huge bank of servers are kept running to store my data and maintain my FB page.  A huge amount of energy goes to keeping those machines running, that company running, it's employees driving to work........
This blog is just as full of guilt.  I justify it by trying to write things here that might cause people to think about their own complicity in this self destructive path we are on.
I am not saying that all technology is bad or that all people are bad.  There are too many of us living the way we live and the price is suffering of the living community and our own self destruction.  There has to be a way to live that is somewhere between being hunter-gatherers and what we are currently doing that we can find.  A more Reasonable Path.