Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Manufacturing Desires

In my daily perusal of international papers I came across this in the Guardian by Timothy Garton Ash: “Our planet cannot long sustain the momentous worldwide embrace of the manufacture of desires.”

When I and my friends bought the house on Wiggleworth Street, my daughter’s closet was miniscule and not deep enough to put a hangar crosswise as in other closets, but certainly large enough to hold all the clothes the original occupant had.

If we look around our homes we see riches that weren’t even imaginable until the middle of the last century.

Meanwhile we run around and fill our homes with junk that is eating up the planet. I remember an advertising campaign long ago for pantyhose that solved the horrible problem of a panty line when women wore regular pants under slacks. Was that really a problem?

How much "stuff" in our homes is based on desire created by outside forces rather than our own minds? How much "stuff" do we have that we never use and don't even remember we have?

Today on the news on France24 models strutted down the catwalk in Japan with designer phones. Now you don’t only need(?) just one, you need one for each outfit.

No wonder the planet is in trouble.

Note: interesting website www.allconsuming.org.uk/blog

No comments: