3-2, Ritual Development

A ritual is something that is observed and done many times over because the act of the ritual means something important to the person doing it. Most often it is something done in a religious sense. For example, the ritual of Communion in a Christian Catholic church is something that is observed and done daily.

Other than the rituals of going to Church every Sunday; some of the rituals I observe are the masses of people going to work every day. That’s how the term “rat race” came about because all the people trying to get to work in the morning before 0800, calls for rush hour. Another ritual that has become more popular lately is the ritual of working out or exercising. We are a fast food nation; obesity has risen like never before. With the weight and health problems facing us, exercise has become more like a ritual in our society. The need to look good and stay healthy is very prevalent. So the rituals I see are people running or walking on the street, or going to the gym to work out on a cardio machine or lift weights is becoming an everyday ritual in our society.

My mother and brother live in NC, while my father lives in Texas. My husband’s family is in Florida. So some of the rituals we observe are sending packages back and forth by mail at Christmas time. I have to work holidays so at Christmas time, mostly in the evening, we get on the phone and open up the gifts that we got for one another. One of my husband’s and my ritual is having coffee together in the living room on Sunday morning while it’s still very early. Another one is we enjoy cooking together. When both of us are home we take joy in standing along side the other and cooking dinner.

The ritual of looking good is prevalent today. Working out, buying nice clothes and perhaps a few cosmetic procedures are becoming very popular and ritualistic in United States Popular Culture today. Wanting to keep up with your neighbors such as buying nice cars, having the nice deck with the grill and the nice manicured lawn has always been important to a lot of Americans but lately it’s becoming more of a ritual to have something better than everyone else.

One ritual I would like to see implemented is the lowering of the wasting of food that occurs in the United States. We’re such a sue happy country that most people and corporations will not allow the left over food to be given to food pantries or homeless shelters because of the scare of being sued. I used to work at major grocery store deli; every night if the rotisserie chickens were not bought they were thrown in the trash. This made me very upset and I asked if we could instead start giving them to the local homeless shelters. I was told no because if someone got sick and sued then the company would have to pay. It was too much of a liability. I’d like to see that corporations come together such as grocery stores or any other company that could help and start giving their left over food to homeless shelters and food banks. There are too many starving people in the world for such senseless things to happen like the throwing away of good, edible food. Perhaps if a law was implemented that would make it difficult for someone to sue a grocery store for food that was given away it would be easier for companies to comply. Of course this would have to be mandated and monitored we couldn’t have companies giving away food that wasn’t good to eat.
Another ritual I would like to see imposed is making it a law to recycle. If it were a law or if everyone had to pay for each bag of trash they put on the street the waste that we produced would be far less than it is today. Another thing I would like to see happen is that the waste companies that are retrieving our trash must comply with recycling themselves. So in the event someone doesn’t recycle it’s that company’s responsibility to go through the trash and pull out any recyclable material prior to burying it in the waste dump.