Dear American Consumers,
I’d like you to know, American Consumers, that this is not an anti-American I-Feel-Guilty-for-Being-Born-In-One-of-the-Most-Developed-Nations-on-Earth post. So leave your yellow snake flags at home, please. Likewise, it’s not a pro-corporate The-Common-Man-Is-A-Jerk-Who-Should-Try-Harder post. Please don’t occupy me.
This story, like so many others, begins with me watching a video about food. Chocolate specifically. In the video it shows a reporter in Ivory Coast going to visit cacao farmers living in mostly squalid conditions. These farmers had been farming cacao most of their lives and, because a very very large chunk of Ivory Coast’s economy is based on the exportation of cacao for cocoa production, one would expect them to be well versed in all things chocolate.
Nope.
They had never tried it. In fact, they largely believed that what they were farming was being used to produce wine. [Note to scientists: Make chocolate wine.] That blew my mind. These men had spent their whole lives producing something I consider an everyday item. I could literally get enough chocolate products to fill up the bed of an El Camino and not spend $500. But these people who have toiled, by hand, for thousands of hours to produce the raw material to make that awesome car of deliciousness, have never even tasted it before. It boggled my mind.
And then I started thinking about how fortunate I am that my problems aren’t real problems. No, really, they’re not. I’ll list some, so you can see what I’m talking about:
- My house is too small for me, my wife, and our dogs.
- The small bridge they are repairing produces an annoyingly long detour I have to go around.
- My iPhone is running slow these days.
- I had to go to the doctor recently to figure out what was wrong with my leg.
See what I’m talking about? These aren’t real problems! My house is too small?! It’s just under 1,000 square feet of brick and wood with more electricity in one room than those guys in Ivory Coast are likely to see in their lives. Also, I could turn on my tap and fill up their well every day for a month and I’d just have to pay a couple of hundred dollars and answer some questions about what I was doing with all that water (hint: chocolate wine). Further, the house has been standing for about 120 years with no wars destroying it, or roving bands of marauders taking it over.
The bridge is causing a detour? Think about that: we complain about infrastructure repair! We have so many paved roads that we complain about the one that’s most convenient not being available for a couple of weeks.
The iPhone? The device in my pocket that contains the sum total knowledge of humanity that I primarily use to make jokes on a social media site for fake internet points? Don’t get me started.
That leg thing? Yeah, I got too fat and my ankle couldn’t handle the extra load. The excruciating pain in my leg was caused by the fact that I enjoy the chocolate that the farmer’s themselves have never tasted, too much.
So I’m musing about all these things this morning while I’m in the shower and I see my wife has purchased a new type of soap. Reminiscing about the days before smart phones, where we had to read the back of the shampoo bottle while we used the restroom, I investigated and saw that this new soap she probably had to have was called Touch of Sparkle. I rolled my eyes and made a mental note to make a stripper joke later. Then I noticed the bottom of the bottle. It said “Diamond Powder & White Calla Blossom Scent” What? What do diamonds smell like? Why is diamond powder a scent? What ingredient smells like crystallized carbon? I turned the bottle over to look at the ingredients list and… well, I still can’t believe my eyes.
It’s ridiculous. My life is ridiculous. And to a certain degree all of our lives are, even if we do our best to not partake in these things, because most of us just don’t know what’s happening out there in the rest of world. Now, hold on, I’m not calling you a bad person for being able to drink clean water and eat chocolate. Far from it. And I’m not saying that America is this shining beacon of Utopic Wonder. We still have Detroit, after all.
But at the end of the day, American Consumers, you have to stop and think about something:
Our country, and most of the people in it, are so rich that we can literally bathe in diamonds.
Love,
Elijah
Dear So and So 