A Slightly Hypocritical if Earnest Rant About Where Your Treasure/Heart Lies and Etc.

18 Jun, 2025

I’ve been trying to stay with the energy (and warm fuzzies due to overall turnout) that surprised me this weekend at the protest I attended. What started as another duty-propelled slog, via the bad comedy of suburban public transportation, to what I presumed would be yet another ineffectual round of calling and responding to the choir turned into a couple of hours of good cheer, good weather, and the joys of fire engines and buses blowing loud horns in solidarity. Nothing about these protests will lead to immediate change—we know that—but there was a new sort of relief in seeing that so many others out there are fed up and will at least get off their asses to hold a sign saying so. That’s worth something.

All the same, I haven’t been able to shake the residues of a mundane nightmare that wouldn’t seem to have anything to do with why and how we’re in our current circumstances, but that could in fact be dead-center applicable. Let’s see if I can piece together what I mean.

Toward the end of the week, in need of a good old-fashioned watch battery, I headed to the big box store with middling hopes that they’d carry such an antiquated item. Unsurprisingly, a bevested employee confirmed I wouldn’t find it there—but did say he’d seen watches at the discount store next door.¹ Resigned, I headed to dd’s discount; the name’s lack of capitalization should’ve given me a clue about what I was in for. Yeah, there were some watches there—still in the flip-top boxes they came in when such things were routine sights ca. 1992—each tied to the metal shelving with plastic security wires, just as every other sweatshop-assembled piece of synthetic fiber and BPA-laden implement in the store was strapped in tight by the same material. It was the lashed-down gumball-machine rings, each shoved into a holder on its own little pillow, that finally broke something inside. All this cheap, cheap shit; this useless, godawfully tacky waste of resources and probable near-slave labor that went into making it. All the people in that crowded store investigating the wares and weighing their possibilities and purchasing power, and a theft-ready proportion of said people apparently significantly high enough to merit measures and materials that surely cost more than the wares themselves.²

I’m not working my way into a jeremiad against the poor for wanting what more fortunate crowds don without thinking; I well remember blue-penning the back of my Payless sneakers in a pathetic attempt to fool the popular kids into believing I was wearing Keds. I recall with still-stinging shame pretending that I did not look like the village idiot wearing the rich classmate’s hand-me-down, approximately three-sizes-too-large, Guess jeans. Had middle or high school me had access to dd’s or even a sidewalk-based vendor of bad knock-offs, I would’ve jumped right in and asked very politely to be allowed to try on that plastic choker, still knowing I’d never fool anyone, especially after my neck turned green after a single wear.

The desires and aspirations of the unmoneyed aren’t the particular problem; after all, the luckier middle and upper classes’ cravings aren’t all that different—just more easily procurable and disposable and much better made. It’s just that the hunger to consume, and the faith that tchotchkes and gadgets will provide some sort of meaning or at least solid distraction, take on extra levels of pain and dissonance—and the potential for exploitation—when it’s a struggle to pay your utilities. Re: that assertion about exploitation, I about caused an accident a while back when I passed a billboard in a blighted neighborhood cheerily announcing that people on government assistance could get a discount on a Prime membership.³ I shouldn’t even try to offer words about that one; the best I might be able to point out is the rank evil of, instead of trying to rebuild neighborhoods, eliminate food deserts, and ensure some basic level of health and wellbeing for all members of the population—even just generally taking care of each other—we can feel good about offering even the teeming masses access to next-day shipping on overpriced organics or fast fashion. A philanthropic win if ever there was one.

I think the connection here between my visit to dd’s and the dissipating good feeling about the protests the other day is that this investment in buying shit, whether high quality or low, is part of the larger problems that will continue to plague us, even if a magic wand appears and lets us remove the hate mongers from every decision-making role. Sorry, sorry: I probably really am heading into fire-and-brimstone territory now, but for example, if we’re to survive on a livable planet, we’ll have to come to some sort of acceptance that electric cars won’t save us, and that the materials we mine for them and our precious phones and whatever it is that goes into our athleisure or yoga mats (not to speak of the varieties of destruction said extraction causes) ain’t gonna last forever. Maybe we could wait a day or two while the t-shirt guys print up something with the series champion’s logo, instead of dumping in the Atacama Desert the batch they’d made ahead of time cheering the other team’s victory.⁴

I’m assuming a lot of the t-shirts I glimpsed this weekend will eventually get dumped, including those I saw that declared their wearers wouldn’t even have to be there had Kamala been elected. And there’s maybe the link I’m trying to make here: what is it the up-in-arms “we” is trying to achieve? I get the sense that for many of us, it’s a simple return to boring politics as usual. Far from aiming for real, comprehensive change in how we live together—how we think about resources or care or even movement from point A to B—the marching through the streets pretty much seems OK with the assumption that if we just get rid of the cretins, we can breathe a sigh of relief and go back to binge-watching and Prime-Daying in peace. And yes, the crucial immediate step is a change of regime; and yes, restoring the cuts made to a variety of government agencies and services is essential and urgent. But much of what’s counted as a so-called safety net or regulatory body in this country tended to lie somewhere between ineffectual and outright cruel joke even before the oligarchs ripped it apart, and much of the way these things really only exist as half-measures has at least something to do with our long embrace of individualism: I do what I want, you do what you want, each of us making our own way without coming anywhere near to asking or accepting anything (financially, emotionally, whatever) substantive of each other.

Under this sort of assumption, the ultimate good, and hence the prime thing to serve, is the self. Self-in-relation-with-others would impinge upon individual sovereignty, so the path to fulfillment seems pretty limited, centered upon humoring your own desires. The sorts of institutions—churches, civic groups, etc.—that offered some sort of tempering of this orientation aren’t really in vogue these days, and one of the only foci mainstream politicians and pundits seem to share is an insistence on continual economic growth. So other than being pushed to keep the economy going, you have as Zygmunt Bauman says about what he calls “light, consumer-friendly capitalism,” a situation in which “redemption and doom alike are of your making and solely your concern—the outcome of what you, the free agent, have been freely doing with your life.”⁵ But the possibilities are overwhelming, and “shopping around” becomes a way of life:

If “shopping” means scanning the assortment of possibilities, examining, touching, feeling, handling the goods on display, comparing their costs with the contents of the wallet… then we shop outside shops as much as inside; we shop in the street and at home, at work and at leisure, awake and in dreams. Whatever we do and whatever name we attach to our activity is a kind of shopping, an activity shaped in the likeness of shopping.⁶

Bauman’s argument is a lot more in-depth and complex than I can do justice to here, but reading his work alongside the everyday human behavior I’m exposed to, I walk away with the suspicion that the literal and metaphorical senses of shopping continually serve and feed each other, to the point where they really do blur together and keep us from understanding not only what we’re doing, but even and especially the (environmental, social, dare I say spiritual) costs entailed. And then we wind up at dd’s somehow assuming everything’s fine.

Of course, a whole lot of people showed up this weekend when they could’ve been doing more enjoyable things. And many, if not most, of them inconvenienced themselves because the plight of immigrants and scapegoats—total strangers—had made a demand upon them, and they felt called to accept the vulnerability entailed in answering that demand. Down as I am about consumerism and my doubts about how far we’ll really go for each other when it comes down to it, that, too, really is something, and I need to hold on to at least that much.

Plus, look: I was no more virtuous than anyone else in the crowd. Because reader, among other things, to avoid using my phone to keep track of the time, I was wearing one of the two five-dollar watches I purchased on my outing.⁷ And yes, and appropriately, it left an evil black stain that stayed on my wrist through the next day.

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