The Retail Scam

So there's an advertisement on television, Old Mutual I think, and the premise is these people (supposedly you and me and the guys next door) on a rollercoaster ride. They (we) are being taken upward, meanwhile down below some officious looking folks are preparing billboard sized posters to be raised to the top most spot of the rollercoaster (where it peaks and drops off). So what you see is this illusion/delusion/dream/metaphor of pictures being raised to basically frame over the rollercoaster to allow it to rise, then more pictures are added to the upward slanting ride, so that it climbs higher and higher.

Whoever conceived this ad either needs to be sent to next year's academy awards for rendering perfectly how stupid our wishful thinking has become, or should be shot on the spot for being a perpetrator of delusional thinking.

The rollercoaster-with-framed-postcards-taking-the-real-world-rollercoaster-car-into
magic-happy-happy-land ends up doing one thing - disconnecting itself from the machinery, the mechanical apparatus of the actual rollercoaster, and we're left with a fantasy. If this isn't the perfect analogy for our collective delusion and self-congratulatory arrogance and hubris, I don't know what is.

In a very real sense, if you drive a car each day, you basically endorse a world food program that says food for (biofuel) and too bad the other 6th 7ths of the world population who must go without. They're expendable. Because in a very real way, each day you make that choice to carry on driving to work, to go shopping at the mall, to watch advertising and pretend this is all normal - well, you are a perpetrator.

By the way, I was at a mall this evening, Killarney Mall. I treated my landlady with my two free movie tickets. We found, let's see, at least half a dozen shops with the windows wrapped up. This is a stone's throw from suburbs like Houghton and Melville, and 6 shops are already out of business. Incidentally, in Rosebank, there's a mall that is mostly underground, and I'm guessing that 70% of it doesn't even operate. The shops are shells. Nevertheless, from what I understand a third mall is under construction in the area. This is called 'throwaway culture'. When something doesn't work we abandon it, and move on to the next thing. We do the same to people when they're not quite thin, sexy or interesting enough.

My job on NVDL is just to remind you that what you are doing has an impact, and you are culpable for your habits. It's to ingratiate a collective sense of conscience. You know that thing where you realise you might be doing something wrong and start to consider changing, making amends...yes, that. See, culpability has consequences. I'd like to avoid a mass gritting of teeth, where we collectively groan: "How did this happen?" Don't wail, don't whine. It's our everyday habits that propel us towards our future, and don't pretend you don't know where that future takes you. It's a place where everyone gets ripped off, and nobody wins. But I'm guessing you already knew that. You just haven't asked yourself: "Since I know what I am doing has no future, why am I still doing it?" The reason we don't do this is not only because we have lost the ability to think, we are also too afraid of what the answers might be. That is The Retail Scam. We hide from the true costs imbedded inside, hidden behind and within all our habits. And we are so far gone we wouldn't know where to start living any other way.