It all comes down to seeing what is important in life and what is not. What we make important is telling, and what we discard as unimportant equally so. The truth of what we do and do not make important does eventually come back to us in terms of our health, happiness, and the success of our relationships. 

     Today consumerism seems to have taken by storm the first position in many people’s lives. Concern over buying that next car, new house, furniture, electronics or whatever is what makes the world go round. In fact the world economy depends on it. The world’s economic order is being held together by the consumer (especially the American one), who if ever decides to stay home, will plunge the world into an economic slide that the present world system cannot possibly hope to survive. Is consumerism, economies based on it, and capitalism, the system that promotes it, really the truth and highest importance to human life? Asked another way, are we responsible for what we consume and the consequences of it? 

     Though each person has to decide for themselves what is important in life it is helpful to see that many people’s choices have been programmed into them by television, marketing companies, and by society itself. If consumerism really is not the highest truth or best organizing principle of life it will fall in on itself and create a collapse in civilization that will make the great depression look like a mild economic/social bump. As Argentina, and the drug lord war in Rio de Janeiro are only now beginning to suggest, as well as the continuing devastating conflict in Palestine, the world divided into those who have and others who have not is not sustainable in any kind of civilized way. 

     The years ahead will give us plenty of time to reflect on what is really important in life and what makes life pleasant, harmonious and sustainable over the long run. When it comes to thinking about others, about the future, our children, it is the long run that matters. It’s only been the last three decades where this lesson, for example, has come home to cigarette smokers. Yes, pleasant in the short term, it kills in the long. Is this what we have done by basing our economies on consumerism? And this question has to be seen in the context that consumerism is something that only about a billion people get to enjoy with special emphasis on the top 500 million. The topic of consumerism take us directly into distribution of wealth issues and the very nasty trend these past decades for wealth to become more and more concentrated in few and more wealthy hands.   

     The greatest problem with present patterns of consumption  and wealth concentration is starvation. To feed everyone based on a European or American standard of living, we would have to gradually reduce the world's population to about 2 billion. Some people think that global hunger is a silent and giant genocide being perpetuated on much of the world’s population for every day 100,000 people die of hunger despite data from the World Food Programme indicating that the world could presently feed from 10 to 12 billion people. "There is no fatality in this nor act of god, it is assassination, for every victim of hunger there is an assassin," said Jean Ziegler, UN special rapporteur on the right to food. People starve as we fatten the world’s cows for dairy and meat production.   

     Not only does modern day meat and dairy production involve much cruelty to animals, but also these foods are unhealthy. Though the dairy industry spends a fortune to maintain our hypnosis about its products, there is little point in denying that these foods are the main contributing factors in obesity, heart disease and a host of other medical problems including cancer, bowel syndromes, and allergies. We have been led to believe that milk and cheese could not possibly cause harm, yet there is much evidence that is growing year by year that this is not true at all. Just because we want something to be untrue does not and will not make it untrue. (I personally am not a vegetarian, though I have gone through a few years of eating practically no meat or cheese. And even though I am very healthy at fifty, my mind and all my knowledge tells me that in the future it would serve me well to eliminate dairy and meat from my diet. There is a voice inside, and informed voice that tells me that I am terrorizing my body with these foods and that if I want the second half of my life to be a healthy one that I better pay attention to this voice. I am fortunate in being strong and healthy and thus am able to withstand the stress of unhealthy foods, but not everyone is so lucky and my luck could run out if I do not listen to the many intelligent voices that speak out about this subject. One of the most intelligent doctors I ever met told me twenty-five years ago that cheese was the world’s worst foods and one of the greatest causes of cancer. So great is the belief in milk and dairy as virtual fountains of youth and strength that most of what I am saying sounds like an absolute hallucination. If true though, it would represent one of the greatest forms of terrorism of the twentieth century, kind of a mass slaughter of health and a precursor of death of the premature kind. All directed against civilian populations, all for a profit. If untrue then only partially untrue because it is being seen with increasing frequency that these foods contain toxic levels of bacteria and dioxins.

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