Karl Marx Hates You.

America's pastime is no longer baseball.  It is self-hate.  Our self-hatred comes from our arrogance, and our arrogance comes from our self-consciousness, and our self-consciousness comes from our deep insecurity about how different we are, like a kid on the playground who hit puberty before everybody else.  You see, it works like this:  we think we are so unbelievably awesome that we feel self-conscious for being awesome-er than everyone else (which we actually think is true!), and everyone else hates us and tells us we are ignorant bull-headed Westerners who think themselves better than anyone.  This is a self-fulfilling prophecy; the more we feel bad the more patronizing we appear.  (Operation:  Christmas Child anyone?)  Then we get whacked in the black hole where our souls used to be (before we sold them to the gods of wealth) with our own super-ego because our Oedipus Complex is for Great Britain (RULE AMERICANA, AMERICANA RULES THE WAVES!).

Whammo! next thing you know we're grapefruit dieting ourselves to sleep at night and feeling like the scum of the earth because we can afford to sip lattes and buy new clothes while the rest of the world (whom we ennoble as the all-suffering, persecuted real scum of the earth)  is in a GAP sweatshop working to produce our commodities for us.  Worse yet, are the starry-eyed youth group kids who come back from a short-term missions trip digging church basements in a third-world country and say,

"You know, we just take like so much for granted, you know?  They are so happy, and they have like literally nothing." 

First of all, how many church basements does Guatemala need?  Isn't it high time we actually built some churches?

Second, they have some stuff so don't say "literally nothing" because it makes you look like an idiot.

Third--and I think this is the beating heart of the Western self-hate complex--wouldn't it be so much worse if we actually thought that our iPods and iPads and AE and A&F and H&M and FYI and SUV's and PS3's actually made us better people?  Ask any self-respecting teenager today and what will they say is the most important factor in their personal growth and development?  Odds are, they will not say their parents, and nobody will reply "My Mac because it's so intuitive."

Nay fellow countrymen.  They will say "My friends."  I know this because I have asked a lot of teenagers, and they said, "My friends."  Although I did get one little weirdo who said proper nutrition.

The point is that maybe it is normal and healthy to take these material things for granted.  At my school everybody seems to be playing "fruit ninja" on their iPod touch.  Sweeeet.  After a while, though, they will go to the next thing--the next game, the next iPod, or the next something else to distract them for another day or two.  Then they will develop boredom or carpal tunnel and they will go on to the next thing.  Confuscius say:  "Always it is the next thing."

"Well isn't that a bad thing?" you ask.  "Aren't we worse people now than we were two hundred years ago because we have shorter attention spans and we have more stuff and we pollute the environment?" you quander as you anxiously suck down half a Double Shot Caramel White Chocolate Swirl.  NO.

Let me explain.  What is the legendary loyalty of the Italians?  Family.  What is most important to poor families in Cleveland?  Each other.  Even psychologically troubled and hormone-crazed tweenies love their friends in between vampire romance flicks.  We live in a digital, material age, but we are organic creatures that find fulfillment in the warmth of others, and not in the cold, hard silicone that we buy with our cold, hard cash  (really, we buy it with our cold, hard lines of credit but let's not complicate things).

Of course there are problems today.  I think that culture as a whole is on the downgrade in America and much of the world.

I also think, though, that it is part of a cycle that we saw in ancient Israel, Babylon, Rome, and yes even Puritanical England.  I hate to break it to you but Shakespeare wrote a lot about sex.  Oh wait I forgot that's one of the reasons you hate yourself, isn't it?  You're an uneducated, culturally ignorant Westerner.  First off, no you're not.  Second, watch an episode of Spartacus:  Gods of the Arena and you'll see what I'm talking about.  We love sex and violence, and we give into our sexual and aggressive impulses.  But that's not any worse than what everyone everywhere has struggled with for all of recorded history.  In fact, that's the whole point of Virgil's Aeneid.  Guess when the Aeneid was written?  OVER 2000 years ago.  Don't be STUPID.

"Don't hate yourself because you're rich" is not the same as saying "Don't hate me because I'm beautiful."  The fact that we can have these things and not care about them is also a sign that we can do without them and not be much put off.  If this decade's earlier economic downturn has taught us anything, it's definitely that we can go from top of the heap to bootlicker with a twist of Allen Greenspan's little finger.  We are a generation that gets its kicks out of shopping at Goodwill and wearing old wool sweaters.  Why?  BECAUSE WE DON'T CARE ABOUT STUFF.  The only difference between us and the penurious happy street children of Guatemala is that we have stuff and they don't.  As far as it changes our level of happiness, there is no difference.  We are unhappy because we are spoon-fed self-hate from mass media execs.

So get a "heart" for the hard-working, indigenous people of...somewhere or read a book to a child or build yourself one of these:

But for Pete's sake, don't hate yourself.  If you have stuff, take it for granted.  Please for the love of God take it for granted.