There's no place like home...

I want this. I want that. I want everything. We live in a consumer driven society, where the cost and availability of an object is the least of our worries. I understand the desires to want material possessions, to be noticed and revered for looking nice or having nice things. But I also understand the evil that is derived from only wanting and never being satisfied. It is a self conditioning behavior to go out and buy. When we obtain that desired object we are filled with feelings of happiness and satisfaction. They problem is that it doesn’t last; we will want more. If we want new clothes we go buy them without worrying about the waste of perfectly good clothing in our closet. We trade for a new car when ours becomes outdated. We lose touch with the important stuff: love, laughter, and compassion, because we are caught up in being the best, looking the best, and acting like we’re the best. In Salman Rushdie’s East, West, the story of At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers consumers are present to take their sought out prize home. The ruby slippers represent our need to feed our materialistic and consumerist spirit. The story is set in the future, where 2001 was a thing of the past. Everything was for sale, the sacred, the secular and the irreplaceable. Those statues and art that represent our societies throughout the world are sold without remorse. History has been lost to greedy wanting hands.

The narrator of the story seems to be lost in the enchantment of what the slippers mean to him and the other bidders. They represent the past, a time when people were content with what they had, when family and having a home were enough to keep your drive to live alive. They are now in a time where wanting and obtaining have left them with feelings of loss. They have nothing to treasure because all the treasures of the world are available to them. Their materialistic lifestyles have caused them to consume all the worlds’ assets; they are left with only physical objects to value. They have created monsters within themselves, only being satisfied when their treasure has been attained. The narrator and the others bidding on the slippers seem to want to return to a more comfortable state, where family and home take precedence in their lives. They live in a Nietzschean society, where their experience is reality and there is no other reality to look to.

The homeless, exiles, tramps and hoboes were all in attendance at the auction because they wanted to return to a past reality, where objects didn’t run their lives. They wanted to return home, just like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. She didn’t appreciate what she had when she had it and was sent to faraway land in order to find what was really important; the good in life, a heart, a brain, and the courage to live your life. The slippers are so wholeheartedly desired "because of their powers of reverse metamorphosis, their affirmation of a lost state of normalcy in which we have almost ceased to believe and to which the slippers promise us we can return." There are those who visit the auction to obtain the beautiful slippers for their own use, to protect them from the witches and evil surrounding them. Then there are the religious fundamentalists that understand the power of the slippers and wish to attain them in order to burn them, to detach our materialist ways from the possessions that took over our lives.

This story represents where our society is headed if we don’t stop the cycles of consumerism. We have become so wrapped up in getting new things and wanting something besides what we have, that we have forgotten that this life is about so much more. This story an embodiment of Annie Leonard’s worst nightmare, our consumer driven ways have caused self destruction of our world. The efforts to sustainability and environmental peace are interrupted by our wanting and consuming. Eventually we will deplete our world of resources and then we will be left wanting, wanting the past to return. Satisfaction with our lives shouldn’t be lead by how much stuff we have or how rich we are. So far, money doesn’t buy everything. There are still those objects that are too revered to have a price put upon them, too cherished to be given to just anyone.

"No matter how dreary and gray our homes are, we people of flesh and blood would rather live there than in any other country, be it ever so beautiful. There is no place like home." -Wizard of Oz