Simplicity - Consumerism

Two words, two worlds, and two languages are swirling about my existence.  I am physically in one cultural paradigm while simultaneously engage in a completely different world view in the spatial plane of the internet cloud.  I hear the ice cream truck and its owner calling out, “Helados por cinco queztales, por niño’s, por todo de famila….” And at the same instant have the screen blare at me an offer for an iPhone 5. 

Simplicity and sustainable living confront the global marketplace and its race to have consumers increase the profit margins of multi-national corporations annually.  Living in harmony with our eco-systems or living off our eco-systems – these seem to be choices that have potentially gone beyond the tipping point in places. 

Consumerism and consumption of resources drive the social structure and the social construct of the “developed” world; a place sometimes called “The First World.”  As I gaze out from my outdoor covered living space in the middle of a subtropical jungle, where the air is fresh and clean, I wonder if the analogy of “first” and “third” worlds is in error.   I turn my eyes back to the laptop screen and read a headline from NPR.org that says, “Why New York is the Hub of the Trinket Trade,” an article that explains how a wholesale market in the middle of Manhattan thrives on providing cheap plastic trinkets to business owners who purchase them for retail sale in Africa and Latin America.  As I look back out to the jungle in front of me, I wonder, “Where do they think all that plastic will go?  Even here in the jungle plastic does not decompose.” 

Another headline catches my eye,” ‘Million Dollar Blocks’ Map Incarcertation’sCosts,” an article where through mapping software technology researchers have discovered that incarceration rates are high in specific areas of low income, poverty, and areas lacking in opportunity – specific city blocks.   These are areas that depend on public education --- areas where increased money spent on education would seem to be money better spent than on incarceration.

There are no “million dollar blocks” in this village due to incarceration or in the state of Petén.  This village and the parents in the village have found it better to invest in their children’s education.  The thought of what an education can do makes me smile as I think of Tonya and Allen, here in the village, who attend school every day.  Tonya has many awards for being the number one student in her school.  She has told me she wants to be a teacher.  Here is the village life is simpler, families talk to each other, eat together, work together, and enjoy life together.  As Sonya, Tonya’s mother told me, “It is a good life, it is enough.