There are few things in the world that are more uniquely special to Americans than a cooked-just-right cheeseburger, with all the toppings and extras one could want. Personally, a good cheeseburger ranks high on my list of favorite foods to savor. I love mine cooked over bright orange dancing flames slathered with gobs of mayonnaise, at least three slices of tomato and double that in the strongest onions one can find. Finally, I love for the ketchup and mustard to literally drip as I pick it up to devour it. (Obviously, you can probably tell that I take my cheeseburger dining quite seriously.)
In these United States, one can purchase a halfway decent cheeseburger at almost any time, day or night. Of course the price is usually correlated to the quality of the burger but we have the opportunity to indulge around the clock, especially in the city of Chicago. There's the "big boys" like McDonald's and Burger King (and I suppose Wendy's as well). There are neighborhood favorites like Top Notch, Maxwell's, and Dillinger's, and countless others all over the communities of Chicago and cities like Chicago. All of these almost innumerable options only serve as undeniable testaments to our freedom in the United States. My purpose here is not to wax poetically about cheeseburgers but rather what cheeseburgers may represent. Bear with me.
Right now in the United States we still enjoy freedoms that make us the envy of the world (despite their continual erosion). For me, enjoying something as simple and mundane as a cheeseburger represents the most pleasant of memories-- of summer evenings free of care, of brief moments of respite after long hours of diligent labor, of relaxing Friday nights at the dinner table with my family. However, our cheeseburger-appreciating culture rests upon a veritable foundation of matchsticks. Beneath our masks of civility and patriotism are barely-chained monsters of fear and anxiety as we look upon these stressful times of financial uncertainty and geopolitical upheaval. Yes, our facade of prosperity is consumed with cracks and bruises, barely holding together. The incompetence that reigns in our nation's and states' capitols rules incredulously and the nation teeters on ruin.
I think about what cheeseburgers represent, along with simple pleasures of the sort and how rapidly American society would devolve into anarchy should we lose them. Our culture seems more and more dependent on sating our collective appetites on leisure and self-gratification, on consumption for the sake of consumption; we seem to lose more and more of what we once were in the temple of the religion of materialism and covetousness with no end in sight. Think about it- what would happen if, like spoiled infants, the pacifier of our pleasure were yanked away? Just like that baby which would cry as long as needed for it to be returned, how much would we destroy, how many would we be willing to infuriate and injure just to have our portion of the "pleasure pie" restored? I attest that our decorum is a sham and it's polished exterior is as fragile as the thinnest, cheapest light bulb one can buy, and all necessary to cast us all into a cauldron of chaos is the loss of that which we have come to think is ours by right. We're so used to satisfying our appetites that it frightens me to ponder on how we'll behave having to go without the trivial nuances we've duped ourselves into thinking we need them.
"Black Friday" alone has shown us a California woman who pepper-sprayed other shoppers just so that she could secure "her chance to buy cheap electronics at a Walmart" (http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gnP4lNWq7GNim9MPpqvajINVGVZw?docId=1054bb0d4514486298f6d82bdcf18881). If this woman would stoop to such levels just to add more to her clutches, consider what people would do when even the bare necessities are scarce or even unavailable!
It's the simple pleasures like cheeseburgers that we've grown fat and lazy from, the excess that has distracted us from preserving and improving our homes, communities, and nation. It is these that we have enslaved ourselves to and have become quite unwilling to live without. Yes, humanity can be quite ugly without legitimate needs- ask the Germans in post-WWI Germany, or African-Americans after the assassination of Martin Luther King. And to think, cheeseburgers aren't even that healthy.
