Excessive America

I went to the bathroom this morning to wash my hands...the water was cold. After a minute of running, it turned warm, then hot. An endless supply of hot water. We have no need to turn on the hot water heater--it simply stays on...all the time. Perhaps it's more accurate to say we have no need to turn off the hot water heater. I leave the bathroom and the luxury of endless hot water (I know there's an end and we're working our hardest to find it) and move to the kitchen. Big refrigerator, huge really. And it's bursting with food that will go bad and be trashed. Excess. Everything American strikes me as over-sized and excessive. And the most beautiful part of all, we are blinded to our over-indulgence, convinced that this is natural rather than realizing that the electricity we use as well as all natural resources are available to us because they are denied to so many others. Water--we had 8 water-less days in Palestine. We won't have one here. And frankly, that's just not natural at all.