Turning Off The Hype: Czech schools say “no” to commercial hype
By Donella Meadows
–Winter 1994–
In the Western world, we’ve built up resistance to the visual, aural and mental pollution of advertising. We doubt, we laugh, we turn off. The advertisers counter with brighter colors, louder noises, wilder images. We close down our senses.
Eastern Europeans had no chance to harden up before their ideological wall fell and multinational advertisers rolled over their [...]
Cleaning Up Loose Ends for the New Year
By Donella Meadows
–December 30, 1993–
Some opinion writers make a habit of filling their last column of the year with a review of their own work — where their prognostications proved right, where they went wrong, how their readers responded. I always thought they did that because they couldn’t think of anything else to write in the slow political week between [...]
Dear Folks: December 26, 1993
Dear Folks,
Day after Christmas. Six in the evening and the outside temperature is already down to zero. The wind is slamming against the west side of the house, and the radio is warning of a wind-chill factor of -50 degrees. I did my evening chores an hour ago, when it was half-dark. I have never done them so fast. The [...]
Your Money or Your Life
By Donella Meadows
–December 23, 1993–
There’s a subversive little book on the best-seller list, a how-to book with the normal upbeat, chatty, you-can-do-it, here-are-the-stories-of-folks-who-did, how-to tone. If everyone followed this book’s advice, economic life as we know it would be transformed. The nation would be swept by an almost unacceptable wave of happiness. And the world would go a long way [...]
Going Too Far
By Donella Meadows
–December 16, 1993–
When she was 16, Breezy Osborne suggested that her father Jennings string up some Christmas lights on their million-dollar house in Little Rock, Arkansas. He had fun doing it. So the next year he added more lights. And the next year still more.
Seven Christmases later the two-acre Osborne yard featured angels, a 60-foot tree, a Micky [...]
