The Daily Galaxy -- The Consumer Paradox: Scientists Find that Low Self-Esteem and Materialism Goes Hand in Hand.

“Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need.” ~From the movie Fight Club, based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk

Mad Magazine summed it up with the statement, “The only reason a great many American families don't own an elephant is that they have never been offered an elephant for a dollar down and easy weekly payments.”

I sound like a curmudgeon, but here goes--

I wore overalls to high school. My mom sewed all of our clothes. I spent most of my free time on the back of a buckskin quarterhorse. As a kid, my idea of a big day was hanging out in the woods. On Friday nights after the football games, we went to the IHOP and indulged in too many pancakes.

Doesn't this little girl in the Juicy Couture ad look like she's 11 going on 30? (I've got Juicy Couture and Bratz in my sites these days.) I think it's a bad idea for a fresh, beautiful child, or any child for that matter, to be walking around with "juicy" emblazoned on her chest. I think the reasons are obvious.

OMG -- and now we have Juicy dogs ...

The tenacious heeler sisters would have this Juicy Couture dog hoodie eaten up in about five minutes. Four, if I fed it to them by hand.

I was driving home last evening with the kids, and the farther away we got from civilization and the closer to our little ranch, our oasis, our refuge, the better I felt.

We spend a fortune every year and make some big sacrifices to send the kids to a private school, complete with farm animals and farm chores (yes, I pay good money so my kids can shovel horse, goat, llama, sheep and pig manure in a well-rounded learning environment with a superb student to teacher ratio while still paying for the sub-standard public schools in my own poverty-stricken state with its fat, delusions-of-being-president governor who's too busy campaigning to pay any attention to education), where they are to a large degree protected from what I'm increasingly realizing is ... my very own culture.

Next year, my daughter--who announced to me yesterday that her intention is to be an honor student and go to Harvard as I drove on silently and pleasantly shocked--will be wearing a uniform to middle school. Whew, that's a relief. One less battle I'll have to wage on the cool clothing front.

I think having kids around horses and involved in outside activities helps push back at this culture I'm finding is increasingly in my face. And theirs. Wherever we look it seems.

There's so much stuff out there to distract anyone who's one iota awake from contemplating the riches, the complete and abundant wealth that is to be found inside each and every one of us. I worry that it snags the little ones early and it doesn't easily let go. Unless someone shows them another way.

Whoever said that being a parent is not for wimps was absolutely right. Frankly, just being alive and getting up every day is not for the faint of heart either.

If you ask me, I'd say we're all rather heroic.