Your Television Sucks

“Market research has found that children often recognize a brand logo before they can recognize their own name.”

“Over half of the population of the USA lives within 3 minutes drive of a McDonald’s”

“On any given day in the United States, about one-quarter of the adult population visits a fast food restaurant.”

America is a cesspool of overweight, ignorant consumers, perpetuating a never-ending cycle of wretched excess.

There is no better way to describe the utter depravity we have succumbed to as a society.

We are whores of the television, of the digital age. A handful of conglomerates mass produce and spoon-feed us our innermost wants and desires.

We are told what we want; through commercials hocking that which we do not need, that which we didn’t even know existed, but that which we ultimately require to live a full, bountiful life.

We are shown what is meant to be seen, and we blissfully ignore that which is not.

We express outrage at an assault which kills three thousand, yet we insistently turn a blind eye from the daily deaths of thirty thousandchildren from preventable diseases.

When we do decide to intervene into a sovereign nation’s affairs, our rationale behind it is eternally suspect.

If we stand idly by and watch the third world pine away, indeed, aid the process in some aspects, doesn’t that make us every bit as culpable as if it was a structured plan of genocide?

Why should we allow the world’s 358 billionaires to have assets exceeding the combined annual incomes of countries with 45 percent of the world’s people?

We continue living in filthy excess. The richest fifth of the world’s people consume 86% of all goods and services. Americans and Europeans spend seventeen billion a year on food for our pets, a number which is four billion dollars more than what it would take to provide basic health and nutrition to the entire world’s population.

With just the equivalent of 55 days of US military spending, we could meet all sanitation and food needs, end poverty and educate the entire globe for a year.

But instead we piss the money away on the pentagon.

We piss the money away on disposables; on disposable diapers, on disposable toys, on disposable condoms; on disposable jobs, parents, and lives.

We feed our fat children McDonalds, and then plop the fucks in front of the television for twenty-one hours a week, a poor substitute for parenting or human interaction. We then wonder why they are so fucked up.

A nation of gaudy consumers peddling away their pathetic lives in the machine which born them, raised them, and will bury them.

And the rest of western society follows us into the abyss.

“What, land of the free? Whoever told you that is your enemy”
– Rage Against the Machine

Any stats or quotes I didn’t cite came from:
Eric Schlosser, “Fast Food Nation”