You must admire the creativity that goes into making every square foot of space in a place into a revenue generator. Vending machines sit in every corner, ads wrap around bus windows, ads flash around the border in the ball park, and blue-screen effects put ads behind the batter. Even urinals have ads perched at eye level, and probably one day (on the principal that all publicity is good publicity) they'll be placed in the target zone as well. Salesmen at Best Buy can be fired for failing to offer to sell useless warranty plans, and it seems everybody has a plan to help you buy right now.
The ingenuity involved is truly amazing: "the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light."
And the result is a horror. The whole is far worse than the sum of the parts. Almost all the things to be sold are harmless or good (excepting things like those warranty plans and divorce attorneys trying to drum up business). But saturate the air with them and we can't breathe.
Leviticus isn't a popular book of the Bible: repetitious descriptions of sacrifices aren't particularly interesting or edifying. But Leviticus 19:9-10 seem apropos:
"When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not be so thorough that you reap the field to its very edge, nor shall you glean the stray ears of grain. Likewise, you shall not pick your vineyard bare, nor gather up the grapes that have fallen. These things you shall leave for the poor and the alien. I, the LORD, am your God.
Our ownership is conditional, and so are our rights to our own property. Not contingent on the whims of the state--that way lies tyranny. God says don't be too greedy even with your own things. I'm seeing wisdom in that I hadn't thought about before.
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