As you know, I usually don’t write a lot about my personal life, really for no reason other than this is a place for cool links of pretty things and not my Diaryland page from 2001. BUT, I came across an article at GOOD about Wal-Mart and it made me think of something I thought of this weekend about life, and I figured we could all just have a family meeting about it and share. Tops? OK!

This weekend, we had a party in the town I grew up in for my brother, who got on a bus this morning for the Army. He’s 18 years old and will most likely be in the Middle East within a year. I don’t really visit family that live in this town anymore, since I moved away and went to college. It always just leaves a bad taste in my mouth, so I try to avoid more than embrace that whole location of my life, really.
And being in my aunt’s city-suburban 2 bedroom house with babies and cousins and uncertainty, it brought to my attention my struggle with selfishness. In a room full of loud, middle Americans, all competing for the attention of each other or the floor for a story, it’s easy to become isolated and snobby.
It’s easy for me to see myself far above all of these people because I have a degree and have seen the Mona Lisa. It’s easy for me to justify my self-imposed social awkwardness because of uncontrollable anxiety that is brought on by family. It’s easier for me to complain about how they make me feel than to talk to my brother about car stereos and coupons for Marlboro’s.
That is why I’m trying to be selfless. And that is why I don’t shop at Wal-Mart.
What I realized driving home from my aunt’s was that the mantra, the philosophy, the way I want to live, is to be selfless: to do the thing that is better or easy for everyone that just what is easier or better for me. And I’m pretty good at it in some areas of my life.
I don’t shop at Wal-Mart because I know the evils that they do. I know the workers they exploit, the jobs and businesses they demolish, the environmental and social harms they impose on their manufacturers, business, and the communities were they build their stores. Here, it’s easy to be selfless. I know that it is better for a lot more people to not shop there than it is for me.
See, what everyone says, the reason why 100% of people shop there, and the marketing angle Wal-Mart uses is that it’s cheaper. It’s pennies and dollars cheaper to shop there. It’s easier on the wallet, on the budget. That’s the very basic idea of business and economics: the demand is for the best bargain. DUH.
But when it’s easier for me to save 10 cents on a can of corn, it’s harder for my sister, who can’t find a job anywhere but there and only gets paid 5 cents over minimum wage. Because Wal-mart shuts down local business, there are less places to work or less opportunity for jobs.
AND I KNOW: these are extremes that are really not based on extensive study or business research. You could argue that they’re good because they provide jobs. Well, that’s also what they said about the Soviets, Mao, and people doing early drug testing on humans. Just because it’s a job doesn’t mean it’s a healthy one for the person or the community.
I could seriously go on and on right now about even more evils of the Wal-Mart empire, but I won’t. I’ll end it with this string of thoughts:
It would be easier for me to shop at Wal-Mart, to not take the time to read the paper and then not vote, work at a job that made a lot of money instead of something meaningful, or move to a bigger city for the sake of its coolness.
But it wouldn’t be better for everyone else. It’s not better for my sister that I shop at Wal-mart. It’s not better for our government or the People of this country to be ignorant and inactive. It’s not better for my future or my family to live for a paycheck than for a meaningful job or to live a cooler city with more access to sushi and thrift stores.
So I’m trying more and more to be selfless. I’m trying to be more aware of the impact that my lifestyle and choices have on the people around me and be responsible for whatever the results may be. I’m trying to be more like my brother, who is putting his life in the hands of our government, so that he can be the man and the dad that his child can respect.
I’m not trying to yell just as loud for attention in the kitchen, but I am trying to figure out what each person is saying.