Well, now I feel like a total a**.
I watched the original “Story of Stuff” as well as the one about the big corporations and the government and I have to admit that I am most certainly a big-time consumer. The good news is I don’t have to take full responsibility. Of course I knew the whole process of creating consumer goods, but she made me more aware of the more minute details. Also, when I saw her iPod in the beginning, it made me think of my ownership of several iPods. I have had 4, and I am soon going to be getting an iPhone 4S… I am ashamed… (still excited though, oh well).
I think these clips and efforts would be helpful and useful for classrooms. It definitely felt like I was watching a teacher speak to me. It could help inspire our even more youthful individuals to stand up and do something about it. However, it left me wondering how we can actually make the effort to change the way these companies do business and their dangerous/toxic processes. The main solution I heard was to just stop. Then do what? I am mostly referring to the garbage situation. She said that we need to just stop incinerating our garbage and create more landfills. But then won’t there be a problem of too many landfills? I don’t see our materialistic ways changing any time soon. There are just too many companies and too many businesses who exploit the process to even make them budge just a little.
It was also interesting to learn that consumerism started from the idea one man, though I think it was a collection of several things. It’s easy to hop on a bandwagon when you are guaranteed to make a lot of dinero…