Thursday, October 21, 2010

The Great Pumpkin as Anti-Consumer Propaganda

The blog Postconsumers has gotten into the holiday spirit with a review of the Halloween children's classic It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown.   Here is their take from the article How Linus Van Pelt Found the Satisfaction of Enough.

... we realized that it’s also a statement about how little Linus Van Pelt and his security blanket find the satisfaction of enough among a sea of consumerism...

Is there any message that could be more apt to the postconsumer movement? Sure, at the end of the night, Linus hasn’t seen the great pumpkin, but he’s made a choice. What’s that choice? That simply collecting things (or in this case huge bags of candy) won’t lead to true satisfaction or happiness. He chooses instead to find another activity that may eventually lead him to happiness. In this instance, it doesn’t pan out exactly as he hoped, but at least he recognized that it wasn’t “more, more, more” that would make him happy. And we like to believe that, some day, Linus Van Pelt really would find his great pumpkin!