There’s also the matter of why you’ve chosen to categorize me as a "consumer" and not a "producer."  Are you saying that whatever it is that I do at work, it’s in a category of importance with, say, my favorite color or sign of the Zodiac?

I’ll admit, my doings in the role of producer aren’t quite as visible as those of my great-grandfather, or yours.   The independent farmer, the corner merchant, the village blacksmith—all those quaint old turn-of-the-century people were as obviously and inextricably linked to providing some kind of necessary product or service as they were to their eye color or height.

We’ve come to specialize a lot since then.  Does anybody at General Motors still know how to make a whole car?   Can most of us tell the guy standing next to the bus stop concisely what it is that we do?  The sheer size of the contemporary mega-organization also does something to our individual significance.  If you passed around a list of the presidents of the Fortune 500 companies, how many people could identify them?

I suppose I ought to accept my designation gracefully.

Still, when I’m summarized as a "consumer," why do I get this unnerving sensation that somewhere, People in High Places have adjudged there to be no appreciable difference between what I fancy to call my "career," and the chores that my neighbor’s attitudinally dysfunctional 11-year-old has to do before he can collect his allowance?

It’s enough to make me want to do just about anything more self-sufficient.  Run out and plant a cash crop of squash in the windowboxes.  Or get a pushcart—start to vend, I don’t know, things.

Now, don’t get me wrong.   I enjoy all the wonderful brand-name warrantied FTC-approved products that participation in our modern post-industrial society enables me to have.  But let’s just get it straight:

Are those things around for my benefit, or am I around for theirs?

On second thought, maybe you shouldn’t answer that.