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The New Age of Consumerism
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Just Add Money
By Bobby Neal Winters
We are living in a new age, and I don’t mean New Age religion, I mean a new age of consumerism. We are now living in a time when, if you have the money, you can buy anything. Having the money is THE necessary ingredient.
I heard a story on the news early this summer about a man who wanted to have a child. He didn’t have a wife, but he did have a lot of money. A woman sold him some of her eggs, which he had fertilized with his semen and implanted into a surrogate who then carried the baby to term. After the baby was born, he hired a nanny to take care of it. Instant baby, just add money.
This was all done using techniques which were developed to aid infertile couples. Neither in vitro fertilization nor surrogacy is without controversy. In vitro fertilization (IVF) often produces more babies than can be safely brought to term. Frequently these are “thinned-out” by abortion.
Surrogacy involves one woman carrying a baby for another. The controversy with this goes all the way back to Sarah and Abraham in the book of Genesis. In that story, the egg donor and the birth mother were the same, so IVF was not required, but the emotional territory being trod has not changed.
Childless couples sometimes become desperate to have children, and who are we to be so heartless to deny them, especially if they can afford it? Nature often hits us with hard nos. Sometimes money gives people a way around those nos.
That is the way it is.
If there is a new twist, it’s that having a couple is not required, but, in reality, it never was. In the old days, I guess, a king could always take a child away from its mother. However, I suppose the fact this is something someone in the upper middle class can do is the novelty. Today in the US, the land of the free and the home of the brave, you can buy a made-to-order baby. When we get better at genetic engineering, you can order special features.
Consumerism is now the driving model. Whatever you want, it is yours. All you have to do is write the check, and all that is missing is the “reality check.” The rich are at a disadvantage when it comes to the reality check because you are much less likely to tell someone he’s being stupid when he’s paying your salary. Nobody told Elvis that maybe he shouldn’t eat so many of those deep-fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches. Nobody told him that the diet pills were bad for him. He was paying the bills and was allowed to kill himself in style.
In our new age of consumerism, you too can be an Elvis.
Consider all of the pharmaceutical ads on TV. Take the right pills and you can be riding a bike down a country road. Write down the name of the pill, take it to your doctor and it will cure whatever ails you, except for those side-effects which in many cases sound worse than the disease, but maybe you can get other pills to take care of those.
In the new age of consumerism, we no longer need the authority of a physician to tell us what to do—like exercise or diet. We can just buy a pill. Why should we listen to him, anyway? We are the ones paying the bills.
Not all, or even most, physicians will give in to this sort of pressure from their patients, but you can see that the pressure is there, and I don’t think its going to become less.
We Americans have never been ones to respect authority. We kicked out the king and elected a president. Consumerism is just voting with money, and the consumer is the ultimate authority.
I am old-fashioned, perhaps antique, because I believe that sometimes we can grow greatly when we are denied our very heart’s desire, however painful that might be. Having one path blocked-off to us can force us to find different paths that lead us to adventures we’d have never even dreamed about. God is more imaginative in his plan for us than we are.
While the rich can practice self-denial, the opposite of consumerism, through self-disciple, it comes much more easily to the poor for whom self-denial is a way of life. I wonder if that is what that odd man wandering around Palestine two-thousand years ago meant when he said, “Blessed are the poor…”
Maybe I can pay someone to tell me.
Or
Just Add Money
By Bobby Neal Winters
We are living in a new age, and I don’t mean New Age religion, I mean a new age of consumerism. We are now living in a time when, if you have the money, you can buy anything. Having the money is THE necessary ingredient.
I heard a story on the news early this summer about a man who wanted to have a child. He didn’t have a wife, but he did have a lot of money. A woman sold him some of her eggs, which he had fertilized with his semen and implanted into a surrogate who then carried the baby to term. After the baby was born, he hired a nanny to take care of it. Instant baby, just add money.
This was all done using techniques which were developed to aid infertile couples. Neither in vitro fertilization nor surrogacy is without controversy. In vitro fertilization (IVF) often produces more babies than can be safely brought to term. Frequently these are “thinned-out” by abortion.
Surrogacy involves one woman carrying a baby for another. The controversy with this goes all the way back to Sarah and Abraham in the book of Genesis. In that story, the egg donor and the birth mother were the same, so IVF was not required, but the emotional territory being trod has not changed.
Childless couples sometimes become desperate to have children, and who are we to be so heartless to deny them, especially if they can afford it? Nature often hits us with hard nos. Sometimes money gives people a way around those nos.
That is the way it is.
If there is a new twist, it’s that having a couple is not required, but, in reality, it never was. In the old days, I guess, a king could always take a child away from its mother. However, I suppose the fact this is something someone in the upper middle class can do is the novelty. Today in the US, the land of the free and the home of the brave, you can buy a made-to-order baby. When we get better at genetic engineering, you can order special features.
Consumerism is now the driving model. Whatever you want, it is yours. All you have to do is write the check, and all that is missing is the “reality check.” The rich are at a disadvantage when it comes to the reality check because you are much less likely to tell someone he’s being stupid when he’s paying your salary. Nobody told Elvis that maybe he shouldn’t eat so many of those deep-fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches. Nobody told him that the diet pills were bad for him. He was paying the bills and was allowed to kill himself in style.
In our new age of consumerism, you too can be an Elvis.
Consider all of the pharmaceutical ads on TV. Take the right pills and you can be riding a bike down a country road. Write down the name of the pill, take it to your doctor and it will cure whatever ails you, except for those side-effects which in many cases sound worse than the disease, but maybe you can get other pills to take care of those.
In the new age of consumerism, we no longer need the authority of a physician to tell us what to do—like exercise or diet. We can just buy a pill. Why should we listen to him, anyway? We are the ones paying the bills.
Not all, or even most, physicians will give in to this sort of pressure from their patients, but you can see that the pressure is there, and I don’t think its going to become less.
We Americans have never been ones to respect authority. We kicked out the king and elected a president. Consumerism is just voting with money, and the consumer is the ultimate authority.
I am old-fashioned, perhaps antique, because I believe that sometimes we can grow greatly when we are denied our very heart’s desire, however painful that might be. Having one path blocked-off to us can force us to find different paths that lead us to adventures we’d have never even dreamed about. God is more imaginative in his plan for us than we are.
While the rich can practice self-denial, the opposite of consumerism, through self-disciple, it comes much more easily to the poor for whom self-denial is a way of life. I wonder if that is what that odd man wandering around Palestine two-thousand years ago meant when he said, “Blessed are the poor…”
Maybe I can pay someone to tell me.
