TOMS Galore

So yesterday was an incredibly challenging day for me, and it was mentally and emotionally exhausting as no school day can replicate. Why?  I went shopping, yes, that favorite exploit of ours…. yet yesterday was so different.  I couldn’t help but think how I didn’t actually need any of the things I was getting.  In fact, I tried to convince the gifter (my granny) of this same fact, but she would have none of it.  When I tried to call in the reinforcement of my father so that he would encourage her not spend so much money on me, he told me to let her do what she wants.  The fact that we now are giving pairs of TOMS to children somewhere (I wish we could track the shoes, it would be so awesome to have an interactive map!!) is absolutely enthralling. On the other hand, the fact that I now own a multiple pairs of TOMS (though I plan to wear them all the time), is not so comforting. And my granny’s reasoning? “Well, they’re just $40.” PRECISELY. They are JUST forty dollars, and so much can be done with just forty dollars, maybe not at the mall, but certainly in terms of food and water and other resources. Now don’t get me wrong, I love TOMS and the ethos of the company….

What I don’t love is how we are so wrapped up in consumerism that we don’t recognize the value of a dollar, and thus we can’t appreciate it.  Now that I can see it a bit more clearly, I am frustrated because I feel like I am stuck in some sort of irreversible cycle.  I want to buy local and organic, but it’s really expensive… I want to own less clothes, but the majority of my fellow students have recently stepped out of a J. Crew catalog… I want to have less stuff, but quite frankly, I don’t even know where to begin (especially when members of my family try to buy my affection)

Oh, but wait. The irony of the day has not even come.  After going to dinner, I drove my granny back to her house and ran upstairs for a moment.  About that time, I heard her shout out to her husband, “Don’t go in there barefooted,” referring to the bathroom of a not too shabby home. In this moment came a stream of images, to many of the children who didn’t wear shoes or wore little flip flops everywhere in the campo of El Salvador, or the men who played soccer barefoot because their shoes were work shoes. Yet we are concerned about walking into a bathroom barefooted. Sure, I guess we should wear shoes in the bathroom, but at that moment I felt like I was living a life full of contradictions.  Too many shoes when others have none, overpriced dinners, rampant consumerism without regard or even recognition, and here I am in the middle of it.