WAKE UP! Its real.

I am constantly frustrated at others (and my own) inability to step outside their own culture and understand other peoples' ways of life. Are we really so stuck up to think that our destructive and selfish american lifestyle is that much better than someone living a life that may have more experience with poverty and not as much access to what we have? Because when it comes down to it, our consumer-oriented materialistic society is going to be what destroys the world. It already is. Look at how much land and how many natural resources we have dried up for our own selfish needs. How many species of plants and animals have been displaced or run to extinction because we needed more trees for houses, more petroleum for plastic, oil, fuels, and whatever else we find to pump it into? How many lives have been destroyed, and how many habitats have disappeared due to our societies hunger for coal? More power, more toys, more machines, is not necessarily better. Its getting harder and harder to ignore the increasingly frequent warnings from scientists about the climate change, and how its all our fault. Yes, its scary. Terrifying really. So what are most people doing about it? Nothing! We are buying more cars and building more unsustainable houses, we are paying even less money to even more impoverished countries around the world for a product that is not meant to last and only use up more of our increasingly diminishing resources. In the process the rich may be getting richer but the poor are getting poorer, the number of people living in poverty is increasing and its not just because they are privileged enough to be a rich white person. WAKE UP PEOPLE! Its time to take this seriously. Stop trying to go back to sleep and dream the world back into the state of the "American Dream" because it doesn't exist. It never did. We have been slowly killing the globe that sustains us. What a way to look a gift horse in the mouth.