War on want.

This morning I spent an hour in the cafetaria of our local hospital, to be honest it’s more like a bar. I was at the hospital after giving a friend a lift (he was in for a check-up - finger up the bum- man stuff). 

The cafe at the hospital is typical Belgian, a guy in dressing gown a few tables down - obviously an inmate - ordered a dark brown Belgian special monks beer -it was 10:00 am. With the beer came the little bowl of nuts which had probably been given to a few customers before him, nuts that had been fondled and touched by all sorts of disease ridden patients I fantasized. 

You’d think that a hospital café/bar would only serve healthy snacks and drinks, but it was quite the opposite, cakes with lush cream toppings, beer, toasted sandwiches with artery clogging cheese fillings, all on sale. It’s as if the hospital had created the perfect business model - curing people while creating the next generation of patients/customers. 

It’s the times we live in, every open space needs to be filled with shops and coffee bars where we can spend the few coins that remain in our possession after paying for the necessities of survival. Airports ,Hospitals and shopping malls all filled with retail outlets of clothes we don’t need and food that poisons us. We’re hooked, addicted, constantly being ‘byte-blinded’ by billboards, on line ads and unwanted spam telling us of the products we need and must have to be part of the herd. 

I remember a time that we only went shopping when we needed something, now a shopping trip is a cultural pass time, look at any shopping mall, hundreds of semi conscious credit card junkies slouching from one store to the other looking for the next shiny thing that will ‘still the need’ until the next time. Clothes that will soon become ‘so last year’, electronics that will need updating by the time you get home and by next year will be obsolete and incompatible with your other gadgets. 

We are hooked, addicts, there is no escaping. Consumerism is a drug like any other, and like all drugs it starts innocently but can easily lead to heavier stuff. It starts with a credit card and ends with the banks repossession of your home. But you never hear of a ‘war on consumerism’, like we always hear of the ‘war on drugs’ . Even though the same can be said for both - and if anything consumerism is worse. Both can destroy lives and livelihoods , but consumerism is also destroying the planet, but that’s not our problem as we heave our shopping bags full of child labor into our car. 

Outside the hospital somebody was making a collection for WWF or some other NGO, I admire the few of us that still believe we can ‘save the world’ , but it’s not ‘the world’ that needs to be saved, it’s us that need to be reigned in. The world is a perfect balance, it can look after itself. It’s us that is the problem, we are the only living things on this planet that have the power to destroy it - totally. We are from nature but not necessarily part of it anymore. 

Leaving the Hospital I remembered a line from one of my favourite comedians -Bill hicks - he said of humans ‘we’re a virus with shoes’ , that is spot-on and a very ironic thing to think , outside the hospital doors.