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OPINION: Walmart... the Cheapest Kind, Part One |
Barr Bentley | 1/26/12
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Inviting Walmart to Pagosa is a mistake, not in service to life. Love and care for all people instead.
Walmart is a premier figurehead in the devolution of a nation into a welfare society addicted to cheap goods, produced by the exploitation of the world’s poor and controlled by corporate giants. Walmart’s presence anywhere is a matter of life and death. As lovers of life, we are challenged not to look through the lens of our own greed, but to truly discern whether a Walmart in our community would be useful to life — all life.
 Songwriter Greg Brown sings a song called “the Cheapest Kind” about his family, who were so poor that when they spent their meager cash they could only afford to get “the cheapest kind.” Cheapening our community with a Walmart is a demonstration of an impoverishment of vision. It is no a way for us to survive.
Pagosa Country is alive with the values of awe inspiring grandeur, rural simplicity, and small town friendliness. We are a unique mountain community. Installation of a Walmart would immediately render us less awe-inspiring, less beautiful, and less special. Siting a Walmart in our area would kill our diverse and attractive local character and lead us to become homogenized into the insanity of a hurried consumer culture. Just another Anytown USA.
We don’t want a community of "the cheapest kind".
We are a Small Town — and Walmart is huge. A business, an architecture. an appetite of such an order of magnitude doesn’t fit here. It will devour us. Walmart knows how to pump in all kinds of mass culture spin designed to distract us from ourselves, dampening our abilities to create and enjoy our own local businesses, art and entertainments, dance, song, and best of all festival markets of life which are the real key to vital small community scenes anywhere.
Walmart reeks death. Like other global mega-corporations, Walmart relies on a flow of cheap oil, which is sustained by U.S. control of much of the world’s strategic energy regions and systems of supply, This, in turn, is made possible by the funding of an industrial war machine supported by a populace compelled by the illusion that the killing of people somehow brings life. For Walmart to succeed in Pagosa, it will use all possible methods to channel the limited supply of local shopping dollars toward its own single powerful wealth extraction machine, including advantaging its economies of scale to compete against the diversity of other smaller local businesses. The job, duty, and calling of today’s mega-corporations is the draining of dollars from one area and concentrating them in fewer hands elsewhere.
Walmart spells death to the livelihoods and life of our community.
We are fools to consider trading the humane pace and scale of small town life for the convenience of quick access to cheap stuff. The visual impact of a Walmart alone is enough to kill the unique and creative natural character of our rural landscape and small town identity and replace it with something cheaper, artificial, mainstream and bland. Our gorgeous daytime scenery and beautiful night skies must not be blighted by the sight of some monstrous rectangular clone of a consumer culture cliché.
Mega-corporate presence kills human dignity. Recognizing the personhood of corporations like Walmart increases their political rights and clout, diluting the dignity of our own honest personhood and cheapening our human rights. Exchanging our dignity for a few short recreational decades of binge consumption and convenience is debauchery. Just more of the cheapest kind.
We’ve already cheapened wildness here in Colorado by killing the Great Bear, Wolf , and Wolverine. Courageous high profile teachers of the truth don’t come cheap. They are the wise and expensive kind, like old growth forests. So we take them first. The same way we took Reverend Martin Luther King... and others.
As a society, we are facing an opportunity to wake up. We can’t wallow any longer in indulgent mediocrity. Like a sleeping teenager who won’t get up and get his chores done, we have become an indolent vapid people living off the exploitation of earth’s peoples and finite resources all within a closed system biosphere. Expecting economic salvation from huge corporations like Walmart, whose very business it is to extract resources and money from their target areas, is a deadly, dangerous idea.
Like hiring cats to guard mice.
Walmart represents the evolution of the American mind with our hopes that somehow we can regain our ephemeral post-WWII affluence by importing more cheap goods. Today as we move away from the precious human-rights based vision of the founding fathers and focus more and more of our attention on our desire for lifestyle and defense of it, we find ourselves sick and stuck, spinning in a colossal momentum of human confusion. The malevolent merciless myopic myth that we can manipulate and control the world to our own ends is but our own violent unconscious hyper-capitalistic nightmare.
Walmart propaganda encourages us to think only about what we want for ourselves and to ignore our planetary bretheren. The industrial populations of the northern half of this planet support energy-consumptive lifestyles through corporate extractions of labor, resources, and products from the world’s poor living mostly in the southern hemisphere. For us to advantage the poorly made, poisonous, plastic-packaged, mass produced prosperity of a Walmart world means taking advantage of others.
Such injustice points us away from the truth that is life.
By welcoming Walmart we’re ringing the death knell of our own self-reliance. Reaching toward a temptingly absurd abundance of cheap foreign-made goods tips us away from our natural inclination to care for and honor ourselves and each other through developing and improving our own creative abilities and cooperating in local community efforts.
A Walmart lifestyle dumbs us down to consuming products designed to last just long enough to get through the checkout aisle. At the same time the child- targeted mass marketing culture embedded in Walmart makes it harder for us to make the courageous choices to provide useful work for our children and help them become self reliant . We and our children are then reduced to only being useful as consumers. Do we want to reduce our personal relationships to transactions? No. We don’t want to give up our rural self-reliance and be forced to suckle up to the tit of the mega-corporation.
We don’t want to live sick and dependent. We want to thrive.
Read Part Two... |
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