I think that the American belief in the power of the status symbol is chief among the shallow manifestations of the mainstream American worship of material wealth. Like Dumbo's magic feather, people seem to believe that if they hold these things, they will soar over the heads of those who can't afford them. There is an obtuse and unhealthy fascination ingrained within our society that teaches the young that wealth is the lion's share of a person's worth and one wingnut, not matter how opposed, cannot change that. But this grossly misaligned belief that posturing a given object into an abstracted system like 'ownership' has anything to do with the amount of worth a person has to the community or the virtues that person may offer as a companion is unadulterated lunacy. I firmly believe that after Western civilization has (not unlike Shel Silverstein's 'Hungry Mungry') devoured itself, from the ashes will rise a society that weighs the value of a person by the content of their character, not the contents of their cart and castle. Until that day comes, the spiritually bankrupt will continue to don their disguises and society will continue to cast them as the key players in our vast and petty drama.
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I didn't mean to get you riled up by suggesting there aren't irresponsible people on the Internet and elsewhere (these boards are fucking pixels like everything else in the resoundingly fake Internet "environment," and not worth squirting out any extra gut-corroding gastric juices over). Everybody knows there are irresponsible people online, and in the American Medical Association for that matter. GStrife, on the other hand, was asking about a minor ache in his elbow, a problem with which it seems some of us have had experience; I figured he could take our advice or leave it and either way, he wouldn't die. As it happened, he came around to thinking he might have slept on his elbow and made it hurt.
Man, I almost told him to boil a rag and bury it in the backyard. The fact is, I forgot that one ...