Cheap

In recent times there's been astonishing supermarket price wars in various parts of the country here in israel. Chicken meat and vegetables being just about given away for free with any purchase above around 100 shekel. The latest is in Kfar Saba with chicken being sold at 1 shekel a kilo (about 40 cents for a whole chicken) and vegetables at 9 agurot a kilo.  Great, right? I don't think so. Not in the subtle long term. The country is literally being conditioned for cheapness, in all its forms and all its manifestations. There's no way a  society can transfer tons of slaughtered chickens (from the slaughterhouse, thru the supermarket, to the home) at 40 cents a chicken and not become jaded - jaded to life, to value, to meaning, to giving respect to things to whom some modicum of recognition is due. And from therein can come all the further maladies: apathy, indifference, neglect, and abandonment -- because everything is cheap, and so  it doesn't mean that much anyway.

I can't express the point as pointedly as I'd like (maybe i'm losing my writing skills or maybe I'm just off point) but i can't help feeling that everything's tied together. That the 40 cent chicken is  the indifference of society to assert "what is right" over that which is "profitable";**;   the grafitti sprayed on a beautifully new jerusalem stone building being that the kid has no conception of what efforts go into such a project or the value of money needed to buy the IPod that his daddy bought for him;  the malaise of a society to an existential perspective of "be or not to be"', the infinity of beauty in an act of true justice and goodness no matter the dollar value gained or lost; and the general resignation of people  to focus exclusively on themselves alone because the world is too f-ed up and too cruel to stand a chance of changing, so better to just "forget about it" -- these are the things that sadden me and this is part of what's at issue when i pass by supermarket chains  with names like: הכל בזול, זול בירושלים, רשת הקניה הזולה בישראל, etc etc. How did we get to the point where "cheap" is a good word in our societal vocabulary?


** I remember as a cashier, management focus was on finding the least path of resistance, not on right and wrong. If customer A unfairly cuts B in line say, but customer A knows "how to make a ruckus", "how to make a scene" -- and say customer B is  a softy (i.e. we can allow A to screw B and B won't make a scene about it). Many times I'm sad to say the management choices were one of pragmatism, not of upholding right and wrong...