Commercialism is a mind virus that slowly saps character and imagination. To simplify is good except in the case of commodification of everything into a dollar value.
After great disasters that cost thousands of lives and livelihoods, media scramble to quantify damage in terms of money, when how can you put monetary value on a mother's pain as she looks at her baby deformed by toxins put from the local steel factory, chemical refinery, nuclear power station, uranium tailings-caused groundwater pollution, toxic waste dump or arms manufacturing byproducts?
Armies of risk adjuster numbercrunchers masticate these morsels of human pain, come to some number or other and sigh in relief. Finally they can sleep easy knowing everything is 'normalised'. "See, it's just money, we can always print more of it" is whispered into ears like bedtime stories, while somebody's burying someone because of some greed head's desire for profit.
Media dangle the latest gimmick, bauble and geegaw to a slavering public and spectacles like the aptly named Black Friday take place, showing us people strong-arming and climbing over each other like wild beasts to be first to 'get a deal', mirroring in microcosm the depredations of cowboy capitalism purveyed by the investor suits high in their penthouses, jacked on cocaine and dreams of buying some art treasure and storing it in a vault,
or some investment jewellery then faked to be worn in public.
People aren't commodities, corporations aren't people. And 'corporate people' give their humanity up in return for salaries sometimes stratospheric in ratio to how many lies they tell themselves and others.
A host can live with a virus as long as immune systems, made to cope with just this issue, remain well-nourished and resilient, furnished by clean air, water and food.
Commodification replaces quality with quantity.
As such it is in bad faith. The choice is reduced to starving or consuming poison.
In that respect it becomes a crime against humanity.
Some commodification is inevitable, but making a religion out of it is letting it consume all that is good in a human.
So many obese children starving inside for real food, so many stupidities superficially sold to us as 'good for the market', so many ecological waste and destruction machines unleashed on indigenous, peace-loving peoples so we can buy cheaper gas to burn stuck in traffic, listening to radio shows and podcasts decrying our dilemma and info-taining us into further papering over cracks and pursuing more false solutions to the problems of life. tea length dress that prom considered
While we inhale the burnt benzene and our dollars fly through the murk to the oil companies to dig more wells and pipe more gas so we can keep our freedoms at the cost of millions in economic debt slavery for nameless workers worldwide.
How to raise children with good values in this moral maelstrom?
People still do, miracle of miracles!
Deep within us we know our natural destiny has been derailed.
This causes alienation, which causes mental illness, the cancer of this century, the scourge of serenity, the virus drains its host. Sanity is stifled and suffocated by numbing drugs that mimic peace of mind but really just offer a simulacrum, a chemically placid individual primed to possibly explode in a spasm of destructive behaviour.
Oscillating between terrified anxiety and desperate, unmet needs, depression ensues when the host's defences succumb and surrender.

'Your mother just died? No problem, tweak your meds, switch to the latest fad diet, go jogging. Coffins are on sale at the big box store, so don't miss out, $99,99 while supplies last so don't miss out!"
"Thanks, doctor, what mother was that?"