Is OC Anything More Than a Consumer’s Paradise?

Affluenza! What a horrifying disease consumerism has become (“Livin’ Extra-Large,” by Scott Duke Harris, April 24). How dare people aspire to live as well as they possibly can without feeling the slightest bit guilty.

David Allen Oehl

San Diego

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The image of the bleached, bejeweled woman grinning astraddle her supercharged status symbol epitomizes our warped culture of materialism and deliberate nonchalance. Viewed through a prism of social conscience, the vanity plates on her Mercedes should read “OBSCENE.”

Stephanie Monash

Manhattan Beach

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Harris did not cite even one of the myriad reasons why 3 million people find OC a marvelous place to live and raise their families. For example, there’s the charm of Balboa Island and the fact that beaches are public. (Did Harris get out of his Ford Escort and feel the sand between his toes?)

Somehow he was unable to discover that OC has one of the nation’s highest employment rates, and that the No. 1 source of those jobs are small entrepreneurial businesses--many founded by people who chose to move here from other countries to live the American Dream. If that is “extreme,” sign me up.

Denise Allec

Newport Beach

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I’d like to remind you that Orange County is in your circulation area. Doesn’t it strike you as odd, then, to send a writer down here on an exploratory journey as if he were looking for the source of the Nile? If The Times actually covered Orange County on a daily basis, someone surely would have noticed that the OC described in the article bears no resemblance to the one in which most of us live. For starters, nobody I know calls it “The OC.”

Mark Johnson

San Clemente