With tears in my eyes

I just chop onions and my eyes water up. Are the tears, that are running down my cheeks, tears of joy, because I grew the onions by myself, or tears of sorrow, because the birds picked out and ruined a good part of the transplants and onions sets and the harvest was not as big as expected?

Anyway, the yield was just big enough to last through the winter.

As I disclosed in an earlier post, I harvested a lot of tomatoes, grapes, chard, various berries, and tea leaves. Also a sufficient number of onions, garlic, ramson, chives, peaches, and potatoes. I got a load of apples from a friend for free (my own apple harvest unfortunately was minuscule).

This food is canned, deep frozen, or stored in a dry and cool part of the basement — my supplies will last till summer, maybe even longer. The stored food increases my independence from the food industry and from big retail networks, though I’m still several steps away from complete independence. A local network unfortunately still is in its infancy.

At least I don’t have to buy onions, tomatoes, apples, and tea in a shop and there’s only very seldom the need to visit one of the temples of consumerism, called supermarkets or shopping malls.

The shoppers may not see it this way and dwell in the illusion that they are just acquiring a few essential and desperately needed items in a retail outlet, but supermarkets and shopping malls are of course temples, they are places of worship to the cult of consumerism.

Consumerism is mesmerizing and hypnotizing, consumerism casts a spell, which only the strong-willed, the most stubborn and determined can break. It is an evil cult, evidently evil as the shoppers are somnambulating through the aisles with a faraway or glazed look in their eyes, pulling or pushing their trolleys like they would be in trance.

Sometimes shoppers become agitated, exited, even manic, they rush to catch items that supposedly are a rare bargain or are in short supply. Arguments, controversies, brawls, disputes around goods, perceived as precious, ensue between the crazed and spellbound, persons, who in their daily life seem to be reasonable and sane get into a rage and start to act completely irrational.

The shoppers are driven by an insatiable appetite for more. They buy more, they continue buying more and more,  yet their desires, their longings are not fulfilled. “You can never get enough of what you don’t need to make you happy” (Eric Hoffer).

The shoppers think, they possess the items in their shopping cart, yet in reality, the items possess them. Not only in this but also in most other respects of their lives the worshippers who are sleepwalking through the aisles are possessed indeed, they are lost and left at the mercy of marketing strategists and propagandists (impulse buying, branding, fashions, trends), or, to state it more appropriately and accurate, at the mercy of the strategists and propagandists masters.

The masters are the ruling plutocrats, persons who acquired immense wealth by heritage or by stealing, robbing, and fraud. The masters use their wealth to control, exploit, and enslave their fellow humans, they use their wealth to amass even more wealth. The masters are not bound by the usual moral codes, they only follow the law of money.

The masters, the ruling plutocrats, are mostly in the shadows (though some of them are narcissistic enough to seek the limelight). They are puppeteers, controlling their puppets (politicians, bureaucrats, managers) from behind the curtain.

The masters, the ruling plutocrats, are the high priests of consumerism.

I don’t ask the blog visitors and subscribers, if they already have slaughtered their proverbial lamb on the altar of consumerism and presented it to the high priests, I also don’t wish the blog visitors a generous, fabulous, and luxurious Christmas, I leave that to the masters.

I wish you ease of mind, peace, and happiness instead.