Living in Excess

I am currently struggiling with the feelings of having too much. Which I have to say is a nice change from my usual complaining of having too little. I believe that this current moral crisis is stemming from two books I recently read; "Not Buying it", about a woman who stopped buying things for a year, and "The Poisonwood Bible", a fictional novel based in Africa, a running theme being the excess of America versus what is considered neccessary in some parts of Africa. Compounding this is the fact that I went Christmas shopping over the weekend, and I was overwhelmed by the amount of things, and people at the mall. HOw can we need so many things? I realized that the whole mall, every square inch of it could be torn down over night (this is assuming an intentional tearing down, wherein everyone who may have been inside exited), and we would all survive. Because everything in there is not a neccessity.

I have at least twice in my life, eaten to the point of throwing up. How can I argue that I do not have enough, when I routinely get told by my body that I have had more than enough? How can I argue that I go without when I am running out of places to put all the things that I am with? One of my professors provided an andecote on the topic that I have never quite forgotten; "a foreign leader was invited to visit Toronto, this man was from a country that was commonly reffered to as a third world country, and he was flown in to see how ties with Canada would help his developing nation. To impress him he was taken down the main street, past the skyscrapers, the billboards, the speedy moving cars, the high powered people, to the main square, a true pulse point of people with it's tv screens, and flashing lights. The intent was to impress him, to show him how advanced our country was. His response was only to ask, "What sadness, what hole exists in all these people, that they are trying so desperatley to fill it with all of these things?" "