The Root Cause is Greed
How Much is Enough?
I’m having a hard time writing today. As one of my earliest posts pointed out, the United States budget consistently prioritizes militarism over human need and I am sickened by the fact that we, as taxpayers, who don’t have free or adequate medical care, who don’t have well-supported teachers or decent public schools, who don’t provide for the poor, unhoused, and hungry in our society, who have been told we cannot pay reparations to Native Americans and the descendants of enslaved laborers, have to accept the fact that our tax dollars are used to fund Israel’s annihilation of the Palestinian people. That our tax dollars fund Cop City and an increasingly militarized police force. That our tax dollars have consistently - as long as I’ve had real employment - prioritized violence, domestically and internationally, over basic human (and dare I add, environmental) care.
I was in a meeting the other day and someone said, “No one gets seconds until everyone has their firsts” (or something like that), and I wish we all believed that. I’ll never understand how the uber-wealthy, the regular wealthy, and even the “strivers” (or wanna-be wealthy) are such slaves to their greed. What is actually broken in them? The image of a Hungry Ghost often comes to mind when I think about these never-satisfied, exploitative, selfish, self-serving creatures doing horrible things to planet and people so they can amass more wealth. It’s clearly a sickness or a spiritual deficiency. And the fact that so many folks aspire to this type of wealth, willingly drinking the toxin that is capitalism and materialism, distracting themselves with shopping and social media and trends while the planet burns and people starve, deeply disturbs me.
Every year, I assign the reading “How Much is Enough? Buddhist Perspectives on Consumerism” by Stephanie Kaza, in my Peace Education class, and each time we read and discuss it, I’m reminded of just how ill our society is. Early in the article, Kaza tells us, “Since 1950, Americans [sic] have used up more resources than everyone who ever lived on Earth before then.” She adds that Americans [sic] spend more time shopping than spending time with their children.
Her analysis that goods become objects of desire, instead of items that have functional purposes is spot on and explains how we’ve gotten to the point where we are. She adds that “consumerism can be seen as a central force in the process of identity formation…and consumerism promotes, rationalizes, and condones harming…and consumerism promotes desire and dissatisfaction.” Consumerism, rooted in desire, will always create an endless cycle of suffering. The Root Cause of desire—or greed, if that word works better for you—will always cause harm, will always be a sickness. So, naturally, I regularly wonder why so many people choose to stay sick? Is it ignorance? Denial? Selfishness? Every day we see evidence that the choices we make—regular folks and those in power—cause destruction to ecosystems and people all over the world, and yet…
Since I am in the ‘business’ of facilitating transformation, I regularly ponder what it will take to invite people into healing and thus, liberation. I do believe that education—from simple conversations with friends and neighbors to classroom practices—can show us other ways of living and being. (And a spirituality grounded in interconnection/interbeing helps too.) The question that remains, though, is can we actually make that shift in time to stop the march of planetary harm and global warfare?