anachronism

I just listened to Maggie Gallagher's talk on how she ended up starting the National Organization for Marriage.  Her story of having a child with a man who ran away really resonates with me.  I am a child of divorce.  I don't hate my parents, but I hate what their divorce did to me and my sister.  I have suffered as a result of not having a father nearby in my teenage years.  My mother remarried and some of my relatives suggested that I treat her second husband as if he were my father, but it really wasn't possible for me to make the emotional leap.  My stepfather was only with us for 4 years, but that experience perhaps developed in me a distrust of all men, bosses and people in places of authority.
We are in the process of creating a world of anachronisms.  Today, we have to pay a premium to eat as peasants did two or three generations ago.  A person's livelihood can be shipped around the world so that CEOs and shareholders can have a better quarter.  Natural mom-dad families can be atomized so that parents can pursue careers or mistresses and kids are supposed to be resilient and thrive in such arrangements.  Anonymous sperm-donors who donates to a lesbian couple creates a father-shaped hole that can't be filled easily.
Why have we chosen to reject what is natural so that we can create something unnatural and untested?  Why can't we learn that there are some things that can't be improved upon?

leaders in obesity

I'm still not sure what has led the U.S. to become such a leader in obesity.  I suspect that there are a variety of factors like our corn-based diet, our suburban car-driven lifestyles, our comfortable lifestyles and even our massive marketing infrastructure that convinces us that "we deserve a break today" every day.  I know that as a resident of Seoul, South Korea, I see obese people much less often than I do in the streets  sidewalks parking lots of my midwestern home state.  I wonder if our ideas about "liberty" and individualism also allow us to make the wrong choices without the social consequences that one would experience in a more communal society.  Here in Korea, it seems to me that people define someone as overweight a lot more strictly than in the American midwest, but perhaps this is because people are involved in each others lives in ways that would be considered intrusive in my culture.  I also think that living in a place where driving is actually a pain means that we drive less and do a lot of our shopping about 100-500 meters from our crampt apartments means that we buy less and walk more than I did even in "downtown" areas of midwestern cities.  If midwestern cities didn't zone shopping away from housing, perhaps there would be a bit less obesity and a little more community.  On the other hand, if there is another major oil crunch we might discover that the way we've been living (suburban sprawl and car culture) is just not practical anymore.  It wouldn't be "doom" in my opinion even if we have to give up cheap gas, cheap energy and even air travel.  Maybe we could get back to things that matter.  Sounds like a "conservative" paradise, even though todays "conservatives" might not be able to recognize it.

Moving away from slacker blogging on facebook

I didn't think that I had much talent for blogging after the big blog bubble of 2004-2005, so most of my attempts at blogging have failed. Recently, I've discovered that I've been blogging by using the share feature on Facebook. It guarantees me readers, but I feel like I'm oversharing for constituencies that don't care and possibly tarnishing my reputation by being trivial. So, I've decided to move over to blogger and spend my time writing over here.

The title Much Too Much comes from my feeling that modern society, culture and consumption patterns are overblown and are likely to cause major damage if we don't change our ways. I love to read books that show how everything we've been doing for x amount of time is leading us to a dangerous precipice and that we can change if we could just...(fill in the blank).

I hope to share the things that I don't feel comfortable sharing on facebook and perhaps I'll pick a theme and keep to it.