A Society Molded

I was recently searching for suitable quotes in Emerson and Thoreau to put into my editorial and I kept running across the idea of materialism.  That is when I started realizing how dependent our society has become on material things and how materialistic we really are.  It is not just a select group of people either, me as well as everybody in this world are uncontrollably sucked into this blind love for Internet, cell phones, Ipods, Tivo, etc.  

I say uncontrollably for a reason; as I was pondering this realization I also realized that it is not our fault we are this way, all of us are born into this madness.  The sad realization is that one can not function in society and not be materialistic.  Yes, people can have different meanings for "functioning in society," but no matter what a person thinks is his or her way to function, the fact is that that path is not without materialism.  I have thought about this for a while, from many different viewpoints, and have found no way to escape the death-grip of materialism.  The reason is simply this; our society has already experienced and lived with all of these things and become so attached to them that giving any of them up is mind-boggling and considered insane.  None of us will admit it, we all say and agree upon the fact that we are too dependent on material items, but the second the idea of change from that dependency is brought up, something happens and it is put on the bottom of the list.  I am not writing this because I have a solution, I wish I did, but I am writing this to open our eyes to our own problem, and maybe being that much closer to, instead of moving that idea of change to the bottom of the list, moving it to the top.