Well, nearly lost another one the other night. Christen’s television was acting up and started to block part of the screen with a black video box. Could not figure out what was the problem. It was a relatively older television which barely functioned when everything seemed to be working. Given this situation what were we do?

Well, we buy another one. We could have sought to repair it but why bother when you can buy another one for about the price of a repair. At Walmart,a basic television can be for little as $140.

Far too often, when something breaks down, we find it more expedient to just buy another one when a repair could have fix it for far less but generally we rationalise it by believing we get something with more features with better quality at a cheaper price than the one we had previously. Why is this so?

Well, as the centres of manufacturing keep moving to China and other parts of Asia with their extremely low wage rates, the prices of electronics, furniture and other household items keep going down. The quality of the items is just as good as before at prices that from year to year seem only to go down.. In America, relentless materialism requires that we get everything we can to make our lives feel complete otherwise we are failures by whatever standard society feels it needs to judge our success. Hence, the need for the latest and biggest SUVs, big screen TV’s, houses that in other eras would be considered mansions or summer chateaus even to the relatively inexpensive iPod players. Even at the lower prices, people in their drive to get it all NOW become indebted to their second mortgages and credit cards. At some point, the reckoning will become due and with the imploding home mortgage and credit crunch situations in the economy, I think the time has already come.

So we keep throwing out perfectly fine items or fail to repair the items we now because we need to spend more on items we should not be able afford but we get them anyways. When we moved into our new home, I cleaned up the garage of all of the old items we did not need anymore. I think I threw out 5 personal stereos, 2 televisions, 3 VHS machines and 2 DVD players. None of it was very expensive when we bought it and to us it was not worth the while to have it repaired.

I can not begin to think how much we have spent in the past several years on items we keep replacing over and over. We do not save for future needs nor do we consider what to do with all of these things. Goodwill has done quite well by us in the past few years.

Perhaps with this recession we are now in, we can take a breather on our rampant consumerism. If something breaks or becomes damaged, just let it go and do without it for awhile if it is not that important. Perhaps by doing without something we can discover something else which we may have forgotten. We neeed to take stock in what we have. Indeed, by any criteria, even the poorest of us now have items that our parents and grandparents could only dream of having. perhaps we should consider ourselves fortunate that we are so rich as a society that we can dispose of such things that others in the world could only dream of.

So much waste.