My library has a bin where folks deposit old magazines they want to pass on to others rather than dump them into the recycle or the trash. Whenever I’m in the neighborhood, I pop in to see what treasures await.

Owing to my new collaging addiction, I desire lots of fodder. Pictures of wildlife grace the pages of my favorite finds, like Audubon. I picked up a few issues of Science just for the charts. Gardening magazines beg to meet my scissors.

I’ve seen the work of collage artists who employ pictures of models from modern fashion magazines. They create surreal images by substituting bird heads for human ones, or they shorten or widen the models. It’s all so bizarre.

While I’ve only been drawn to use glamour shots from earlier eras, when I found an issue of Harper’s Bazaar in the bin, I thought, “Why not?”

I expected there would at least be a few gleaming jewels that might be good for something. I used the dial of an expensive watch as a halo one time.

That evening, I sat down with scissors and my big trove of magazines. After I’d garnered every bit of fodder I wanted from the other magazines, I was down to Harper’s.

I opened it and entered an alien world.

First off, I noticed an odor wafting into the room each time I turned a page. It reminded me of my old lady teachers in elementary school. I don’t think that’s what Chanel intended when they placed the pricy perfume ad with scent-orama.

Maybe you love Harper’s. Maybe you dream of filling your jewelry boxes and walk-in closets with the wares advertised within. Someone must because advertisers are paying big bucks for their products to grace Harper’s pages each month.

Page after page, I ogled at the oddities within—famous people I didn’t know modeling clothes in strange poses, outfits so weird they seemed fit for a circus, sweatshirts that cost hundreds of dollars, shoes that made me think of foot binding.

I felt myself slip into a mood of moral superiority with thoughts like:

That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen.
You’d have to be an idiot to spend so much money on that!
What a waste.
Don’t they know there are people starving?

You get the idea. I was filled with smug self-righteousness.

But wait.

While I find the frocks in Harper’s bizarre, the ones on display at the Biltmore’s Downton Abbey Exhibition set my heart aflutter. Aren’t they examples of conspicuous consumption at the end of the Victorian Era?

I live with just one other person in a four-bedroom house. When it’s really hot outside (like over 85), I turn air conditioning on to cool this big behemoth.

I’ve spent over $400 on shoes in the past two months. I can (kinda) justify the first two pairs, but did I really need that third pair?

Don’t I subscribe to oodles of video services to stream into my giant TV? I buy nursery plants every summer. I dine out at least once a week.

I love art. I don’t own any, but I love to go to museums to gaze upon it. I attend concerts. I own more books than I will ever read. I’ll never use up all the art supplies piled around my worktable.

My point—while my lifestyle and spending choices may not seem extravagant to most of you, I am a very rich person compared to the majority of people living on this planet. My smugness about the prices of items in Harper’s is the pot calling the kettle black.

Yeah, I know, my Apple watch didn’t cost what a Rolex costs, but to a starving child in a war-torn country, it might as well have.

Over the course of that evening, I went from righteous indignation to questioning my morality. That was two weeks ago and I’m still pondering how to reconcile my lifestyle with my values. Good timing since it is time for my quarterly goal review.

Those who have been following my blog may recall that Mother (herself an atheist at the time) sent me to the Baptist church around the corner to learn morality. There, I heard a lot about sins of commission, i.e., when one purposefully chooses to do something wrong.

The only lesson I recall about sins of omission is from the parable of the good Samaritan (Luke 10:29–37). The priest and the Levite who passed by the beaten man in the road committed a sin of omission. They weren’t the ones who beat the poor fellow, but they saw his plight and ignored him.

And then I chose to study bioethics and I read Peter Singer and many others who have a lot to say about acts of omission. I even named one of the flower beds at my old house, The Peter Singer Garden, because, during the many hours it took to create it, I was debating with Singer in my head about the morality of spending so much time in that manner rather than in helping others sentient beings.

Many argue that Singer carries utilitarian ethics to the extreme. For example, under his reasoning, those who have two working kidneys are obligated to donate one of them to someone on dialysis. It is morally required, not optional.

In other words, the Baptists and then the philosophers deeply instilled in me a belief that it’s not just my actions that matter; my inactions also matter in the grand scheme of being a good person.

I don’t want you to think I’m walking around plagued with guilt. I’m not (maybe I should be). I’m trying to be thoughtful about my values.

I’m actually glad a Harper’s Bazaar fell into the library bin just in time for my quarterly review.

I’ll be thinking about my sins of omission while I go paste together a collage instead of saving the whales or planting a tree or serving up soup to the homeless or donating blood or the myriad of countless other things I could do to make the world a better place.

Harper’s Bazaar

Living with Words

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