What are we really teaching our children?

Why do we live the way we do? For one thing it is quite nice living  the high consumption "American" lifestyle. Having an iPhone and the latest clothes and a new car and a belly full of meat and air conditioning makes our lives easier to deal with, if not fully live. For another, looking nice and owning expensive things is a means of obtaining status, the so called "American Dream". We are a materialistic society that sees the accumulation of physical goods as a noble cause. Ask any college-bound high school students why they are going to college and the overwhelming majority of them will answer, “to make more money”. Not to help others. Not to further the progress of mankind. We see money as a means of achieving ALL these ends. With money will come authority, status, respect, and socialization, the things many of us most desire.What happens when ads, the media, and culture itself actively promotes consumption? We get a society where the sole concern is obtaining money to purchase material goods, it leads to placing a higher value on possessions than on the actual well-being of people. It left unchecked it will inevitably lead to economic recessions, the Great Depression in fact occurred partly because of the prodigious amount of spending people did to obtain all the extravagant luxuries the roaring twenties offered. A decade of wasteful spending on unnecessary is what caused the decade of the most extreme poverty the U.S ever experienced. The consumer society and the idea that we can consume and consume in ever greater amounts, that is promoted by society, is false.  Former President Jimmy carter  said in a speech "Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we have discovered that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose ....The symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us."