Putting Things in Perspective

To amuse themselves, the neighbors had a snow blower trucked in, which blasted artificial snow all over their lawn and atop some stacked straw bales so that their kids could do some sledding. This in the middle of Southern California, where the "winter weather" consists of daily lows in the 60's, with the shining sun proceeding to promptly melt the snow within hours of it being laid down. A short-lived and pricey expense, and a quite tacky and highly visible display surplus. On its face and in the face of our cascading economic and environmental crises, this behavior is preposterous at best and even immoral at the worst. 

But it is not much worse than the greater system that that excess springs from. At a larger scale of time and space, the very ground in the form of the built environment that we stand on is just as preposterous: the oil-fueled sprawl of Los Angeles and Orange County is itself an unsustainable excess and will be impossible to maintain into the contractionary future; it is the material analogue of large checks being written based on lean bank accounts, with the biting water and energy crises making those contradictions more visible. 

While the community can do plenty of grumblings about the excesses (or shortcomings) of its neighbors, only a minority ever seems to have the capacity or even the will to see realities that far out. Much inter- and intra-organizational feuds seem to involve excess and dearth as extensions of a single system.