You Get Used to the Smell

I have often wondered about hoarders. Watching the hoarding series back when I had cable increased my questions. There has to be a smell from all this clutter. At the very least there has to be a stale smell. How do they stand it?

My guess is that they just get used to it. Hoarding does not happen overnight. I guess that if it happens gradually enough we can get used to anything. That explains my weight, I just got used to it. That explains bad marriages, the couple just got used to it. It also explains the cliché of the boiling frogs. Frogs placed in cool water are not supposed to notice if the temperature is gradually raised until they die. It is a potent analogy, but I always doubted that the frog would stay put.

If we can get used to a bad marriage, a bad smell, or weight gain, how much harder is it to notice more obscure moral issues? We do not see the child labor that is in our products. While companies like Apple are making good progress to eliminate this, they recently fired a supplier as they had to do to maintain good PR, for the most part we do not know.

We do not want to know.

The beloved editor of the Prophecy Podcast, Pam Dewey, has been doing a series on child labor on her blog. She points out the societal structural situation that led to child labor, with an emphasis in part one on the darker side of the industrial revolution. Click here for part one.