Blog 3

Yoon Saechow

Dawn Blunk

Transitional English

April 22, 2011

Blog 3: Anna Quindlen

            Anna Quindlen’s explains in her essay how bad the United States has become because of out of control consumption, the United States has been consumed by buying wants more than needs.  Now we have storage facilities filled with meaningless junk that just collect dust and money.  The economy is on a decline because people spend money they don’t have through credit cards and wind up in debt, we all are digging ourselves a hole so deep we won’t be able to get out.  Anna tries to give a solution for this problem by suggesting that instead of buying things like a fancy cell phone; which will be outdated in a few months, spend the money on college tuition, rent and food.  I have also been infected by this disease of spending on meaningless things myself.

            A few years ago my girlfriend and I got a credit card just like everyone else and didn’t think that we would ever be in debt.  Buying a few items and not being concern that this was the start of a bad habit.  Buying one item after another and just thinking that we can pay it off when we have the money but this debt started to grow dangerously.  A year later we find ourselves owing a few thousand dollars and wondering what in the world did we spend it on, how did it come to this.  The majority of the items we bought were just meaningless junk that we didn’t need to buy.  The money could have been used for college or a car instead of nonsense.  After a few years we were able to take care of the debt and we both learned a valuable lesson.  The lesson I learn from this experience was to buy items that we need, and also avoid credit cards.