If there is one
thing capitalism provides it’s choice. Go to your typical supermarket and
you’ll find more options for frozen French Fries than is good for you.
Seriously, you could waste the better part of an hour making sure you get the
best value and the best option available. Same with the soda aisle: the variety
screams out to us from the bright colors that decorate every box of cans. True
too of bottled water. This is where it gets kinda weird: Why does anybody need
100 different varieties of bottled water? Can anyone tell me the difference? Nevertheless,
this is America and you deserve 100 varieties of waters to choose from.
Anything less would be socialism.
But while 100
varieties of bottled water may seem like far more choices than we could
possibly want, perhaps it is less than we actually need. Perhaps the mountain
of plastic bottles blinds us to the option we’d actually prefer.
Who having an
option between clean, cheap tap water would prefer lugging home cases of the
stuff from the supermarket? Who would prefer polluting the environment with plastic
when we could totally eliminate the waste, again by providing drinking water
through the tap? Who would prefer wasting our precious resources—in this case
oil used in the production of plastic—when we could avoid all that? Especially
when the Middle East is such a mess, it seems a shame to send our troops over
there to fight and die for plastic bottles we really don’t need. Or for the
fuel required for the trucks to unnecessarily ship bottles of water across the
country.
So who would come
up with such a crazy system? Someone out to make a buck. Nobody’s going to get
rich providing cheap tap water, especially when the government tends to stick
its nose into such matters and make sure water will be available and affordable
to even the poorest of us. So in the long run, those various different bottled
water companies are not competing against each other, how can they? How can one
of them make the claim that their water is better than the next guy’s? You can
only do so much with a picture of a snow-capped mountain. There are only so
many buzz words such as “pure”, “natural”, “life”, and “healthful” you can slap
on the label and still keep them large enough to attract the eye.
Of course, some
try to argue they use less plastic than the typical bottled water, as if
conservation of plastic were an argument they should bring up. Nestle’s Pure
Life package proudly states it has an “eco-bottle”. Re-read that sentence just
to drive home the idea of how screwed up we as a society are. If you wonder why
people can’t think anymore it’s because vapid advertisement has broken our
brains. Words don’t mean anything anymore, they’re just supposed to sound nice.
And reassuring.
So whose water
you buy doesn’t matter, just so it comes in a bottle. Same with soda. Pepsi
doesn’t mind if you buy Coke and Coke doesn’t care if you cheat on it with the
occasional Pepsi. The important thing is you consume teeth-rotting diabetes
juice because, after all, a rising tide floats all boats. And it works the same
way with politics, only in reverse. In politics, hundreds of millions of
dollars are spent not to entice you to buy but to turn you off from the entire
process. They don’t care if you vote Democrat or Republican, their goal is to
make you so disgusted with politics that you don’t vote at all.
That’s the system
we’ve worked out as a society. These are the choices you have. Well, not
really, they are the choices that are laid out for you. These are the choices
they want you to make, the world they try to fashion for you. But your choices
are as vast as you can imagine them to be. You don’t have to buy their vision,
you don’t have to fit your mind inside of the box they have prepared for you.
It’s a small world offered and in the end we humans deserve better than the
world they envision. Next time you are presented with a choice of a bottled of water
or a can of soda, remember there’s always beer ;)
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