The United States is the most prosperous nation in the world, and yet our citizenship has been comprehensively reduced to consumerism. A culture in which our primary directive is the quest to accumulate this stuff, or at least more than our friends and neighbors. Buy and ye shall be happy. But what have we truly purchased? In the words of my favorite poet, Henry David Thoreau, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” our lives prostrate at the altar of the false gods of our instant-gratification society.
