Things

Most of us love things. We collect things. We store things. We hoard things. Often, the less useful things are, the more valuable we consider them. There is really no logical, sensible reason that a baseball card should be sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Or that a single painting should sell for millions. Clearly, the pasteboard, ink, canvas, and paint are only incidental to the value. Even the excellence of the athlete and the genius of the painter do not account for the value. Scarcity is the driving force behind the value. Noting the scarcity or uniqueness of the item, people find it desirable. The more people who desire it, the higher the dollar value goes. The higher the value, the more people want to own it. And the spiral goes up and up, as more people with more dollars chase an item of complete uselessness.

This is very odd.

On a more modest scale, people rent more mini storage units with every year that passes. Some few units are used to store excess business inventory on a temporary basis. Most units are used to store items that were always useless or have become useless to their owners. Clothing that no longer fits or has gone out of style, books no longer of interest, dishes and ornaments for which we no longer have space, toys our children have lost interest in playing with. There is little reason to expect that the owners will ever actually use the items they have placed in mini storage. So why store them instead of disposing of them?

We love our things.

Why are so many of us fixated on things? It’s an avoidance ploy. Human life is not an end in itself. People are merely one dimension of spiritual beings. We know that. Almost all of us know that but we get confused. Religion, being a human invention, often adds to the confusion. We wish to be good, we wish to please God. But too often we distrust our own innate knowledge. Too often religion tells us that we can’t be spiritual until we die, we can only be religious as people. To take our minds off this dilemma, we turn our attention to things.

We can understand things. Things are palpable, we can see and touch things. There is no ambiguity about things but there are an infinite number of differences. Baseball cards, for instance. Each player’s card has a different picture, a different set of stats. Some players have more than one card. Some companies produce higher quality cards than others. Some cards remain in pristine condition over the years, others become battered and torn. All of these differences impact the desirability and value of the cards.

Consideration of these differences gives collectors an infinity of discussion points – endless hours during which spirituality does not have to be contemplated. This is true for any collection of things, whether it’s a collection of cheap salt and pepper shakers or a collection of coins worth millions. Even if it’s a collection of research papers on where each and every one of the Egyptian Old Dynasty pharaohs is at the present time.

Things take our minds off such uncomfortable subjects as the infinite, heaven, hell, God, gods, incarnation, reincarnation, the chakras, and the difference in soul and spirit.

American Concentration Camps

When other people build concentration camps, we Americans get very upset with them. Those of us who grew up in the time immediately following World War II have especially negative feelings about concentration camps because of the way Hitler used them. They have been used in many countries for many purposes but the effects have seldom been benign. So it comes as a shock to most Americans to find that their own country has long used concentration camps as a way to control various segments of the body politic.

The first concentration camps in America were used in breaking the power of the Indian tribes. After the wars and massacres had killed enough members of a tribe, the survivors were often sent to concentration camps which were sometimes far removed from the tribe’s homeland and/or reservation. For instance, after the second Modoc War, the survivors were shamefully incarcerated at Fort Klamath until the chiefs were executed, whereupon they were permanently removed to Oklahoma and their lands distributed among the settlers.

A more recent example is the shameful “relocation camps” of World War II. People of Japanese descent were forced to leave their homes and businesses to live in concentration camps, complete with barbed wire and guard towers. Not only were Japanese nationals incarcerated, but U.S. citizens who happened to have Japanese parentage, as well.

Now Uncle Sam is once more in the concentration camp business. The Washington, D.C. papers recently ran photos – on the front page, above the fold – of a concentration camp in Texas that is used to incarcerate suspected illegal immigrants. The caption stated that it takes months and sometimes years to return people in the camps to their home countries. Why? Why does it take years? The people in these camps are not doing anything productive, they are not moving forward with their lives. They are locked into the camp and out of their lives.

Americans are much too fond of locking people up. Our prisons are overcrowded, dreadful places of iniquity. Our nursing homes are notorious for their inhumane treatment of the old people locked away in them. I could make a good argument for ghettos being concentration camps, with locks and fences replaced by psychological fetters.

It’s time to change the wording at the Statue of Liberty. We can no longer welcome the tired, the hungry, the poor of the world. We have no resources to help them acclimate to our liberty. In fact, we barely have enough liberty for native Americans, much less immigrants. What we have for immigrants, unless they are very careful to get their paperwork exactly right, are concentration camps. It’s a damn shame.