Too much STUFF! (Part 2)

Sometimes it really hits me that ours is such a wasteful society; not just in the amount of packaging we discard and garbage we produce, but in the sheer volume of stuff that is available for us to purchase.

I’ve watched documentaries and telethon-type tv programs showing children in Africa, or Central- and South-America living in the most abject poverty; children whose parents make a home for them out of discarded packing crates and a sheet of corrugated steel. When I look around at what we have, and I have no trouble understanding why the people in these poorest of nations look at the western world and shake their heads.

Why should we have so much, while they have so little?

Of course, we won’t resolve this inequity simply by getting rid of our own stuff, but it wouldn’t hurt for us to examine our lifestyle, and see if we can’t simplify it somewhat. If we buy less stuff, we’ll have more money to, perhaps, give to charitable organizations which provide aid to these poor nations.

Friends of mine went to Argentina last summer, to work on a Habitat for Humanity build. One of the reasons they chose to do this was they felt uncomfortable going on a resort-style tropical vacation, where tourists stay in opulent surroundings, waited on hand and foot, while just down the road the residents live in squalor. Instead, they wanted to do something to help make a difference.

Watching the slide show of their trip I was struck by how small and plain the house was that they were building, which was one of several being constructed for that project. It was about the size of a single car garage, and would be considered ‘spacious’ by the family for whom it was being built.

Bruce told me that one of the locals who was assisting on the build, after being told how big a typical house in Canada would be, asked "what do they do with so much space?"

Judging my the state of my own house, the answer is "fill it up with stuff."

It isn’t just the poorest people in distant lands who are lacking. We need look no further than our own city to find people who don’t have for themselves the things we take for granted.

When I volunteered for a local community agency, we had some office furniture donated to us. I asked another volunteer to help me move the furniture. I knew he had moved a number of times himself, so I was quite surprised when he didn’t seem to understand the technique involved in negotiating tight corners and stairwells.

I commented on this, and asked him "what did you do all those times you moved?" His reply put the matter into perspective for me: "We put our stuff in plastic bags and carried it to the taxi."

Sometimes I wonder if we keep buying stuff just because we can, as if to prove to ourselves — and to others, perhaps — that we have attained a degree of comfort, even affluence, that is beyond what our parents and grandparents may have had.

Anti-poverty activists keep telling us that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. In reality, when we compare the lifestyle of the average Canadian to that of the poorest people in the world, we find that we ought to count ourselves among the rich.

It is estimated that 1.2 billion people world-wide live in abject poverty.

In Canada, as reported in the 2001 StatsCan census data (latest available), just over 4.7 million people have a reported income less than the Low Income Cut-Off — an arbitrary measure of spending 70% or more of family income on basic necessities. Of course, these numbers include those living in abject poverty as well as those who are just getting by.

However, much like the "climate change" issue, the issue of poverty is very polarized. Those who would advocate against poverty tend to give a great deal of emphasis to factors that portray the situation in very severe terms. Governments and agencies who are in a position to respond to the problem do not deny it exists, but tend to use more moderate interpretations of the same data.

I’m not saying that just because there are people in this world — or this city — who have very little, or even nothing at all, that it is wrong for us to live comfortably. Lowering our standard of living to the lowest common denominator won’t solve anything.

However, perhaps we should examine our lifestyles.

But… that’s just my opinion.