Goodreads Bookshelf
Do as I say, not as I do
I'm currently listening to Barabara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle as an audiobook, and I've really been enjoying it (review will no doubt follow when I finish). I've been struck by a number of points she makes and would like to write a bit about one.
She talking at one point about eating locally, which involves eating foods in their natural season.
The main barrier standing between ourselves and a local-food culture is not price, but attitude. The most difficult requirements are patience and a pinch of restraint--virtues that are hardly the property of the wealthy. [...] We apply [these virtues] selectively: browbeating our teenagers with the message that they should wait for sex, for example. Only if they wait to experience intercourse under the ideal circumstances (the story goes), will they know its true value. "Blah blah blah," hears the teenager: words issueing from a mouth that can't even wait for the right time to eat tomatoes, but instead consumes tasteless ones all winter to satisfy the craving for everything now.
Come to think of it, it is a rather interesting contradiction, that a significant portion of our culture preaches waiting but perhaps an even more significant portion of our culture can't wait for, well, much of anything. Our debt level speaks to that: while some of that arises out of necessity, it seems--especially over the past 20 years or so--that much of that debt load came from people living beyond their means, convinced that they need everything now. New furniture? Why not? Brand new car? What's credit for, anyway? Flat screen TV? You deserve it, and you deserve it now!
Regardless of your stance on abstinence-only sex ed, it seems easy to see the inherent contradiction in parents who can't delay gratification of their desires telling adolescents (who, it should be noted, are more in the thrall of the chemical soups we all live in than their parents probably are) to put off this one particular thing. And while the consequences of youthful indiscretions can be severe, the consequences of fiscal irresponsibility arising from a lack of restraint hardly seem less consequential, but seems to have been less criticized in our culture.