A timely essay on America's obsession with material goods:
Clueless in America: Feeding the Tape Worms of Desire
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '.')..We cannot recognize that the American Dream is the world's nightmare. Our gluttonous wants, we think, supersede the right of other people to exist. The gilded highway is built upon the bones of the victims of genocide and empire, and that is what makes our ride into oblivion so smooth.
What can be said about a culture that is willing to destroy the biosphere, to create irreversible global climate change for the sake of private profit, and a few short decades of drunken exuberance and intemperance? In what kind of value system can the acquisition of material goods and services really outweigh the right of others to exist, including our own children and their children, not to mention more than thirty million species of flora and fauna that have as much right to live, if not more, than we do?...
...It can be seen that Americans are a spiritually starved people, despite bold proclamations of religiosity and faith. But at some level we must intuit that we have few freedoms and are slaves in an economic system that dehumanizes us into mere commodities and turns us into voracious consumers. We are not the free and fulfilled people we claim to be; we are the property of our employers, objects to be used for purposes not of our own choosing...
...Material goods and services are a poor substitute for inner tranquility and global community. We are a people bombarded by commercial media every waking hour of our lives. Our troubled existence is a matrix of distracting white noise from which the only escape is the calm slumber of death. The result is that few of us have ever had a true waking moment in our lives. We have replaced wild nature with Disney World and have forgotten which is real and which is bogus. We have recreated god in the image of capital and put him on our currency.
We're addicted to goodies. We can't get enough stuff. We want more and better shiny trinkets and toys. We're spoiled rich kids, desperate to fill the holes in our lives with material objects, hoping that somehow if we buy enough of the right ones, we'll feel better about our lives, and ourselves.