Events unfolding in a shockingly depressing sequence make me fearful. The fear can be immobilizing, and confronting it and breaking through is my new obsession.
I find that concentrating on the positive outcomes that lie on the other side of all this economic despair is the most helpful mindset. Maybe we’ll emerge with a culture that values things other than consumption at shopping malls. Things like: growing gardens, cultivating friendships, sharing what we have, building parks, bike trails, caring for our children, making college educations available to anyone who will do the work, rethinking health care and how it’s dispensed. Those things can all create jobs for people. For an eloquent and inspiring essay about this revolution of the spirit, go here.
James Howard Kuntsler says our “Happy Motoring” culture is coming to a close. Now I love my car (actually a truck) as much as the next guy, but I’ve long been a big critic of our car culture and the soulless urban/suburban landscapes it has enabled. Some of that blight will go away, but it will take a long time. Let the infill begin.
The pop-up lid of our kitchen garbage can broke, and we planned to throw it away and buy a new one at Target. One night after we’d gone to bed, our son got a drill, twisted some wire in the new holes, and the next morning it was working again. Although you wouldn’t say it’s as good as new, it’ll make do for the time being. To me this stands as a symbol of our new realities. At the end of the day, we saved $24.99 and kept a lot of material out of the local landfill. (Of course, someone making trash cans lost their job. And Target’s shareholders got a smaller dividend.)
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1 comment:
Right on!
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