Need to sell/corporate interests are in direct conflict with our lives, making thinking so relevant!
I was in the car for just a few minutes and caught the Big Ed show, and he was discussing the NRA as a front for gun sellers. It made me think of everything else in our lives where our own health/best interests are in direct conflict with the barrage of ads coming at us over the radio, TV, print - hell, Gmail, the web, you name it.
Sure, it is guns, but also beer, cigarettes, junk food, the oil industry, pretty much fill in the blank. On one hand, we all like to think that we have free will to choose what we buy, what we eat, what we use - and that is complicated, of course, by our psychology and chemistry and genes, combined with the addictive properties of some substances, either naturally or put there by companies. We claim we hold life so dear, yet all it takes are considerations of corporate profits to devalue those lives immediately.....
It just struck me how important it is for all of us to stop and think - beyond reacting to urges, habits, what we hear and see - and to process what it is we are reading and hearing and seeing. And to compare that with how each of us chooses to live - our health and life goals.
Yesterday was my weekly lunch with my two friends and we were talking about the various happiness indexes of states and countries. One of my friends, a southern Democrat (who is a social liberal but fiscal conservative - came from big money, family owned a small business, very religious - so highly conflicted in how to make sense out of it all) admitted that the happiest countries are the ones that take care of their people the most and have the least wealth gap - he uttered the term "socialism in the best sense" - Norway, Sweden, etc.
And that made me wonder about the US - and how dysfunctional we are as a country - so much potential being completely undone by the wealth gap, nasty politics, and relentless push at people to buy stuff, including stuff that is not good for them - so of course the country becomes, by and large, unhappy. Because stuff can never really make us happy....in my opinion, anyway.
What a mess....anyway, that is my daily observation/mini rant. These things always make more sense rolling around in your head as they come to you - then I try to lay it out in a post that makes sense, and this is what happens!
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