Our houses are protected by the good Lord and a gun, and you might meet 'em both if you show up here not welcome son. Our necks are burnt, our roads are dirt and our trucks aint clean, the dogs run loose, we smoke, we chew and fry everything. Out here, way out here. ~Josh Thompson, “Way Out Here”
And I’ll bet they fix things rather than running down to the local all you can buy boofarama of Asian made plastic pumpkins and other assorted crap. I am not one of those rabid recyclers; those unhinged humans who think that we are killing the planet and that the planet would be better off without us. I do however understand that 50-75 years ago (a time period that many will remember) things were built to last, and to be repaired. My granddaddy used to fix televisions; he started out fixing radios in the 30’s, and when television came along in the 50’s he started fixing them too. Point being that he would not recognize today’s televisions. I have 2 flat screen TV’s in my home and don’t get me wrong I enjoy both of them. However I am painfully aware that they have a great potential to become roughly 1100 dollar paper weights. And while the cost to replace the smaller of the two has dropped to below 300 dollars, it does not make sense to me to bear that cost when it should have been built to either last longer than planned obsolescence, or made in such a way that it would be repairable by a competent individual with a minimum of tools and knowledge.
Part of the problem lies in the constant need for humans to consume, hence the reason we are no longer called citizens (at least not in the United States) but consumers. It’s a possibly well known, possibly not well known, possibly flat out wrong axiom that all products necessary for a year’s consumption could be made in a matter of a few months, but what then to do with the remainder of the months that are left. In the days before (before what I’m not exactly certain) the farmer would grow his crop, take his crop to market where he would trade with others for what they grew, in this way he could supplement his own food stores with stuff that someone else had that was surplus for them. He then took those things home and preserved them for the winter, in the winter time the farmer would repair whatever implements may have been damaged during the growing season, or to build things that he would need for the following growing season, it’s important to remember that farmers grew and put away during times of plenty, and left their protein sources (also known as meat) to run around in its otherwise unaltered state until it was needed. Chickens do not lay many eggs in the wintertime, as a defense mechanism against the inevitable cold, so those chickens that were maybe a little older, or possibly not laying like they should have toward the end of the season, became soup, fricassee, broiled or otherwise consumed by the farmer and his family.
In order to accomplish this though in the most efficient manner possible the farmer (or other person of that era) would make things that made his life a bit easier. Whether it was a “killing cone”, feather -plucker, or perhaps something else that the individual would need.
The main point to all of these inventive ideas, was they were readily repairable by the person who built it, in the event it (whatever it was) broke with some simple tools the creator of said implement could easily repair it, there was no running down to the local department store to purchase a replacement when whatever it was that one was using finally bit the dust or needed repaired. Even if the original implement was created by someone else, the person using the implement usually had the tools, knowledge, and wherewithal to repair whatever it was. In the event they could not repair it themselves and a trip to town was required, one could be certain that it was repaired as good or in some instances better than it was when it was new.
Now a days, we just trip on down to the local whatever mart to get a new one, I remember my mother having the same toaster for probably 25 years, it broke down once, and she let me look at it, it turns out to have been a simple matter of oiling the slide that you push down to make the toast, it was otherwise sound. I took that toaster with me when I moved out of the house at age 18, mom had the toaster for several years before I was born, and it looked it, but when your first out on your own you take what you can get. It was replaced in a fit of consumerism by my ex wife, because it looked too outdated for our décor, but mind you it worked perfectly well, that was 1985 and here in 2010 I can’t help but think that it would have still been making toast had I not succumbed to the consumerist lifestyle.
I keep things, not to the level of hoarding them mind you, if something has in fact outlived its usefulness and cannot be repurposed into something else readily, or if I don’t have an idea for it right away, depending on the raw materials it contains I’ll scrap it myself, keep the items I know I can utilize at some point in the future, and discard the rest. The end result is the same for the item, the junk heap somewhere to be buried with every other bastion of our consumerist society, however my junk foot print, to steal from the “climate change” crowd is much smaller than most people that are in my rough income bracket, and the stuff I keep will end up being something else later on down the road, in essence doing my own little bit to starve the beast and return the balance.
I’ll leave you with a quote from Robert Heinlein, to wit:
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, Conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
-Robert A. Heinlein
We have become too specialized, so specialized in fact that we lack the skills to repair the simplest of things, seeking instead to replace rather than renew.
