Consumers?

I believe that the advertising industry has done us a great injustice when they branded us as consumers. To consume means to use up, eat, demolish. Branding people in general as consumers encourages us towards greed and carelessness. Why bother to build the best product possible when it will just be consumed, refuse, to be thrown into the mounting trash heap? Better to produce something that will wear out, so we consumers can satisfy our unending appetites with yet another new product.
Years ago, I read Marlo Morgan’s book, “Mutant Message From Down Under”, the story of a woman’s time spent in the Australian Outback with a group of aboriginals. At one point, the whole group is hungry. They have gone many days without food. Suddenly, an animal appears in the desert. After the animal is killed, one of the aboriginals says, “We must use all of this animal. We will waste nothing, for it has chosen to give its life that we might live.” As we pick up a roast at the supermarket, we feel no connection to the animal from which it came. Offshore manufacturing has removed us from the joy craftsmanship. We flock to the dollar stores and big box bargains. Buy it; use it; throw it away, has become our mantra.
Are we really just users with voracious appetites? We march like a lawn mower across our world, chopping up everything in our path. We spit out the waste, taking for granted new growth, next week, irrespective of what we have left.
I believe we human beings are co-creators with God. We know how to cherish, respect, and value our world. We are God’s chosen children, created to care for this beautiful world, not consume it. We don’t have to accept the role we have been inherited from society. Consider the creation story as presented in “The Message”, a new version of our ancient Bible. “God spoke: ‘Let us make human beings in our image; make them reflecting our nature, so they can be responsible for the fish in the sea, the birds in the air, the cattle, and, yes, Earth itself, and every animal that moves on the face of the Earth.” (Genesis 1:26-27)