materialism, i'm not finished with you

i've realized that materialism takes many forms. yes, we, as a society, depend on "coveting thy neighbor's goods" to sustain our economy. but "goods" doesn't just refer to your best friend's shirt, or your sibling's sweet new ride, or even to your neighbor's house. thanks to plastic surgery, you can covet your neighbor's gooooods (i.e., nose, face, boobs, butt) and get that too, only tighter, firmer, smaller, or bigger, depending. i'm taking the opportunity to pick on spencer's better half, heidi, because A) it's easy, B) it's cathartic, and C) she's in the news.

after what i just read (i'm such a loser), i must add D) it's sad.

now, my four loyal readers, i'm not going to turn this into a gossip rag. i'm not going to waste your time (or mine--i have a synopsis to write!) on senseless celebrity drabble because most days, i can't care less who's doing what or whom and when. i'm using heidi as an example of the epidemic that is sweeping girls across our great nation, and across the world. the perception of feminine beauty as thought up by an overweight, balding, old guy. the perception we cling to. that women have to be skinny and super tall, while maintaining big boobs and big bootays.

many, many, many, many moons ago, a famous painter named peter paul reubens painted voluptuous, curvy women like these:

The Three Graces

he painted Venus (the looooooooove goddess) as a curvy blonde. back in his day, which was the 1600s i know, it wasn't a crime to have some meat on dem bones. it was frowned upon to be a skinny, waifish, little thing because that meant you were A) poor or B) diseased. women like the graces were esteemed as beautiful. there are fertility goddess statues of women with large breasts and large bellies. and it was OKAY. it was the STANDARD.

the difference between those cultures and today's culture is that they didn't covet immortality. we do.

we want eternal youth. we women don't just desire growing old wrinkle-free, we DEMAND it! hell hath no fury like a woman scorned by her crows feet and laugh lines! God forbid we tell our stories on our faces. God forbid we look like we've lived.

i can't be the only one disconcerted by what i see on TV and in magazine ads. women who are stick straight with huge boobs, airbrushed to perfection in print; women 40, 50, 60 years old afraid that one wrinkle will transform them into old crones when women who allow themselves to age are so beautiful (and don't freak me out in olay commercials). my grandmother lived to be in her 70s. she didn't have a wrinkle on her because she took care of herself. okay, she had the crows feet, but that was about it. she didn't care if she got them. i loved and admired that, especially in a culture that thinks wrinkles are like cancer. worse, really.

so where does heidi fit? *honestly, i almost forgot i'd mentioned her. i have to try to reign this bad boy in*

heidi falls into the materialistic category that houses plastic surgery. coveting your neighbor's ass, and i don't mean donkey, folks.

there's so much that bothers me about this girl. she's only 23 (i'm 24), and yet she's had at least THIRTEEN surgeries. thirteen. nose, lips, boobs, entire face. and she wants more. it's sad. it's sad that we can't be comfortable in our own skin. and it's even worse that people profit off our insecurities, but of course, people will profit off anything these days. here's a girl, who was actually pretty before, now looking like a trampy barbie doll. honestly. there are lots of things i'd like to change about myself, too, but i'm not going to. because i want to be okay with what i have. i love what my body could be should it lose about 20 pounds (to be in that healthy range). i'm happy with my face. i don't want to think that the only way i can be beautiful is to have some person who doesn't care about me deconstruct my entire body and rebuild it as some plastic mess. i don't want that. i want to explain to my kids, especially if i have girls, that i developed an awesome personality through my ugly faze, and now i'm happy with who i am. what's the point of looking like everyone else?

no one can be happy as-is anymore.

and what chills me is that this girl thinks God's okay with her. um, NO. i dye my hair because i like the colors better. i admit it. but that's as far as i go. she's tucked and enlarged and removed the things that make her who she is, and if she thinks that the "real me" is some inflated, sanded down, superficial surgery-addict, then that's pathetic, and i can guarantee that that is NOT what God created her to be.

see, these bodies don't last, no matter how we try to preserve them. and when heidi dies and decomposes, all that'll remain of her will be silicone.

what kind of legacy are we leaving for our children? we're teaching our sons that girls like heidi are what to look for (forget personalities. those are so pasé), and we're teaching our daughters that you must look like this to be accepted. it's wrong. it's immoral. and it's unfair.

but, again, these are the people we want to be like. go figure.

only more materialism can make it right!

"So hopes for a vigorous rebound rest on spendthrift consumers being as materialistic as ever."

taken from an article i found via yahoo talking about the four things that could cause a potential re-collapse of our economy.

i have to ask: isn't materialism what got us into this mess in the first place? people buying what they can't afford for little more than showing off? (not the term i want to use, but it's 3:17 in the morning and my brain is sliiiightly shot...)

my mom and i had a great conversation today, and during said discussion arose the topic of higher depression rates among teens and young adults. after my "duh" moment, i found quite a bit of truth to the article i read, which correlated the higher percentages with the materialistic views of our society. "getting rich" is one of the top reasons kids strive toward higher education (obviously, they haven't thought about the thousands of dollars that they'll have to pay back in loans that will suck them dry [i'm not bitter]), and dammit, doesn't spencer 'the brat' pratt (i totally just made that up!) make being rich look sooooo appealing?

i never wanted to be rich, per se. i want to be marketable. but i want to raise my future children to live within their means and not be spoiled brats who got everything they ever wanted. there are people who've worked hard for what they have, but there are more who have lied, cheated and stolen to get where they are now. they've milked some insane event (jon and kate, i'm looking at you) for every fifteen minutes of fame they could get, and then some. some of them are downright undeserving of it because they don't know how to handle it.

as pat summit, the incredibly sage-like coach for the UT Vols women's team, asked after lane kiffin ran for the hills (beverly, that is), "how much money do you need to live?" granted, ms. summit isn't exactly begging for change, but she has a point. what does it take?

where has loyalty gone? where have legitimate hard work and sacrifice gone? why can people like the pratts, jon and kate, and countless others be picked out of the obscurity the rest of us live in and be counted as elite, whether you like them or not? WHY?!

and why do we want to be like them?

because of the materialism that, sadly, sustains our economy.

we have no values anymore...

politically naive

i think i am politically naive. actually, i know i am, probably because i think politics are stupid and that we need to abolish the current party system (waits patiently for the FBI). in this country's 200-something year history, we've done little more than step on the people with the least power. we did that with the native americans, we did that with quakers, with africans, and with the poor. now we're doing it to people without health insurance.

like i said, i'm politically naive. however, when my attention span allows me to watch shows like larry king or anderson cooper, because i refuse to watch fox (which might also make me biased), and there's the person or panel of people discussing the healthcare reform bill, all i can think is that this is a group of people who probably haven't had to live without health insurance. more than likely, they graduated college straight into work via interning. some of us weren't even that lucky.

***as a side note, when the hell did penn jillette become a legit political analyst?***

i lived a grand total of two months without health insurance. my dad's was able to cover me until the calendar end of the year i graduated, but after that i was on my own. luckily, i had already worked through the first third of getting my benefits (60 days to go after that), but the fear that i would be involved in an accident or fall extremely ill (which i'm still prone to every so often) loomed over my head every day. i work 30-35 hours a week if i'm lucky, so what i bring home is barely enough to keep a roof over my head and pay the bills. adding any medical bills to that, or meds or anything, would not bode well for me. that was just two months of my life. i know people who have lived for YEARS without health insurance. they had to choose between healthcare and groceries, healthcare and gas, healthcare and bills. THAT is unfair and unAmerican. why the hell should people have to pick and choose if they can cover themselves and their families should something go awry? it's really sad that in the centuries we've inhabited this land and have developed one of the most well-known (and complex) governmental bodies on the planet, we haven't yet come to an agreement on the best way to care for the people as a whole.

to me, this is one of the points where capitalism fails.

capitalism dictates every part of our lives. it creates socio-economic classes. it creates the "great divide" between poor and rich. it dictates what kind of house you live in, what kind of furniture you have, how big your yard and car are if you have one at all. only the people with lots of money can afford the nice houses, cars, and clothes. they have more than they need. that's the dream of capitalism--to have more than you need. maybe not the purpose, but the dream. the purpose of capitalism, supposedly, was freedom from the feudal system, or the ability to change one's social standing from poor to rich. and that's exactly what's happened. some empires were built by poor immigrants who refused to stay poor. ironically, those
empires now crush others who want to improve their standings as well and they make it more difficult for entrepreneurs and small-business owners to make their livings. everyone knows about the Wal-Mart effect, so there's no need to beat a dead horse, but think about it. this is what capitalism has brought us: the few crushing the many.

http://www.zpub.com/un/bill/gateshse4.jpg

the above is a link to a picture of bill gates' house, a "40,000-square-foot mansion on a wooded five-acre compound in the moneyed Seattle suburb of Medina." bill gates is worth $18 BILLION, which is DOWN from $40 BILLION. he has three kids. don't know the ages. i make $20,000 a YEAR (in a good year). i'd have to work roughly 900,000 years to make that much money if i did that correctly. not like anyone's going to check my math.

pre-tax evasion nicolas cage owned:
***More than a dozen homes, including a castle in England, an 11th-century estate in Germany, and two entire Bahamian islands
***An untold number of cars, new and classic. He once paid $500,000 for a Lamborghini previously owned by the shah of Iran, nearly $300,000 more than its value. “He didn’t care,” says a friend. “Nic at an auction is dangerous.”
***A collection of pets one friend describes as “basically a zoo,” including two albino king cobras; he keeps antivenom nearby
***A dinosaur skull
***A collection of shrunken heads

He also made a $1 million donation to the Red Cross, and a $2 million contribution to Amnesty International

the guy makes like, $20 million a film. if i can budget less than $1000 a month, then how can he not live on that much money? seriously. and tax evasion? COME OOOON. if i can pay my taxes, he can pay his. simple as that.

i say that to say this:

as of 2009, forbes magazine counted 359 billionaires in the US and 23 in Canada. they counted 214 in Europe. there are 308,156,478 people living in the US. there are 731,000,000 in Europe. doesn't something seem off? maybe it's because i've been up too long.... but anyway, where i was going with this was to here.

http://dll.umaine.edu/ble/U.S.%20HCweb.pdf

the US healthcare debate is about more than insuring all americans. it's about maintaining that 17% of our GDP. we basically live in a country that's willing to exploit every facet of our lives to turn a buck.

i'm tired. time to finish up my work crap.