We have pretty much finished our Back to School shopping this year with a few overlooked items still not yet purchased: a gym mouth-guard, a flash drive and something else. I forget what.
I find this Back to School stuff somewhat bizarre, I have to admit. It is not a holiday, really, but a consumer event that takes over the stores for a month before school starts. Walk into a store, and there you have it: Back to School sales, Walmart being the worse perhaps. They have the school lists in case you forgot yours and, also for your convenience, everything’s all there right when you walk in: aisles of notebooks, paper, glue sticks, backpacks, calculators and on and on it goes. You can also find pencils for like 47 cents, so there’s deals to be had. Wow.
Back to School, however, is not alone; it’s in a constellation with other holidays. We rotate holidays through the Big Box Stores these days and the lesser ones as well. Start with Back to School, then take that down and put up Halloween, then Thanksgiving and, with Thanksgiving the Black Friday abomination (another newly spawned holiday for capitalists), then we begin setting up for the grandest of all consumerism holidays: Christmas. It’s all there, from pens to Turkey to Candy to gifties wrapped in Santa Claus paper, from Frankenstein to chestnuts roasting on an open fire.
Who would want anything else?
I wonder, though, if we have really plumbed the depths of useless capitalistic holidays as we ought! What about Groundhog Day, where you’re expected to buy expensive toys and food for your pet, and did you know that June is National Candy Month – can you imagine what they can do with that? I looked online and found that yesterday was National Pet Rock Day. Yes, September 4th was that, and how did you celebrate it? Did you buy a Pet Rock? And why not?
Anyways, back to Back to School: I don’t think it was like this when I was a kid. Back to School meant a few pencils and a notebook, and we were done. Those days are long gone. We now have lists a page long of Back to School items with everything from Flash Drives to glue sticks to of course pencils, paper, notebooks and even Kleenex! Yes, Kleenex. You would think the school system would at least provide Kleenex but, no, Kleenex is now on the backs of the parents to provide, and you wonder what is next. (I wouldn’t be surprised if my kids will have to bring their own toilet paper in the future, so I put this in parentheses in case some school administrator is reading this now and suddenly gets a great idea!)
Looking at this objectively, we can ask: is there something amiss in all this rush of consumerism in the name of education? I think so. The thing is, I do pay property taxes every year, and these taxes are not insignificant. You would think if you paid thousands of dollars in property taxes on an annual basis, you wouldn’t have to provide Kleenex so Junior could blow his nose in class. You would think so, but it is not so.
Hmmm.
Perhaps we should celebrate something other than rank consumerism and stop turning all our holidays into excuses for such. Maybe holidays should be about important things rather than just buying more stuff. Maybe. I’m for that, but for now I have to go. There’s a flash drive I have to get for tomorrow and a few other things, but at least I already have the Kleenex.
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