8.28.2005
Me and Paris; Living the Simple Life
I was kind of surprised after I sent the final email in the series ("Last Days in Tanzania", below), that a lot of people picked up on one sentence, buried in the last paragraph. I had written, "I am trying to set up my life in America to be more basic and more socially responsible than it was when I left for Africa."
My friends, being wonderful people, brought this up and challenged me about it. I'm still figuring it out, and I'm not forming a philosophy as absolute as veganism or as radical as Marxism. I have a few principles that I'm trying to set up my life around, and I'm still working on the logistics. The principles are:
1) Show love towards the people around me.
2) Avoid supporting sweatshops.
3) Minimize my personal impact on the environment.
4) Eat food that is natural.
5) Live with what I need, and not with what capitalism tells me I should want.
I find it quite disturbing that in our society #2-5 are extremely difficult, and #1 is tricky, especially with strangers. I guess I could give up everything and move to the woods and make my own soap and all that. But I want to be able to participate in society and live a life that is morally acceptable too. All five of those principles were easy to adhere to in Tanzania, why, here, do they have to be so hard?
My friends, being wonderful people, brought this up and challenged me about it. I'm still figuring it out, and I'm not forming a philosophy as absolute as veganism or as radical as Marxism. I have a few principles that I'm trying to set up my life around, and I'm still working on the logistics. The principles are:
1) Show love towards the people around me.
2) Avoid supporting sweatshops.
3) Minimize my personal impact on the environment.
4) Eat food that is natural.
5) Live with what I need, and not with what capitalism tells me I should want.
I find it quite disturbing that in our society #2-5 are extremely difficult, and #1 is tricky, especially with strangers. I guess I could give up everything and move to the woods and make my own soap and all that. But I want to be able to participate in society and live a life that is morally acceptable too. All five of those principles were easy to adhere to in Tanzania, why, here, do they have to be so hard?
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Great Principles! You're right that they are harder than they should be to follow. What can we do to make it easier for Americans to live better?
Many more people lived according to these principles (not always voluntarily)when I was growing up in the 1950's. Unfortunately it was at the expense of the domestic labor of women like my mother, a miserable housewife who would have been a full time professional career woman if she had lived fifty years later.
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Many more people lived according to these principles (not always voluntarily)when I was growing up in the 1950's. Unfortunately it was at the expense of the domestic labor of women like my mother, a miserable housewife who would have been a full time professional career woman if she had lived fifty years later.
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