We noticed our kitchen garbage was smelling pretty bad and needed to be taken out. So right away my wife and I looked around the house for any waste paper baskets we could fill up the bag with. After that we went through the fridge to clear out any old food containers. It was only once we had a full garbage bag that it occurred to us: we could have just taken out a mostly empty bag.
But it hadn’t occurred to us. That’s not how we were raised. A garbage bag had to be crammed full before you took it outside. It was just…the way.
A while before that happened, I found myself doing something I realized my parents would be proud of me for. I wasn’t accomplishing anything that would bring renown to the family name. What I was doing was making a peanut butter sandwich. But the part I felt they would approve of was that I was using a spatula to get the last bits of peanut butter out of the jar. Because that’s what they taught me to do when I was young and it was something I at that time resisted. Because it made extra work for me. But that was the reality they grew up in, both of them being raised during the depression when waste was not an option.
Thrift was an inconvenient idea for people of my generation. We had so much in the way of material possessions and cheap goods it really was easier for us to throw something away and just get a new one. We were a generation torn between an older way of doing things and a new one.
I don’t know about people younger than myself, but anyone my age or older experienced it: that moment when you brought an appliance or an electronic device to a repair shop to have it fixed, only to be told that it would be cheaper to buy a new one than repair it. We all felt the wrongness of it. But in the end, we were all taught to save a buck wherever possible. But we knew, we knew, that it shouldn’t be this way. We knew we were participating in a system that didn’t make sense. And yet we trusted the system, trusted progress, trusted authority…we trusted something. Because up until then it made sense to trust, because the system was working and it seemed like we were progressing and those telling us to trust didn’t seem all that scary.
But that trust we had in a system has led us to where we are today. We live in a society where half the food we grow is wasted while the great lakes are being turned into dead zones due to the extensive fertilizer used to grow food we don’t even eat. We live in a society where people rent storage units to hold the possessions they don’t have room for. And the real cost for all the waste we engage in is finally becoming unavoidable.
If I could tell one thing to young people today it would be what my parents told me. And their parents told them and so on, back into prehistory. Do not take what you do not need, do not take seconds until you are sure everyone else got a first serving. If you put something on your plate, you eat it. Do not waste because there are others in the world who do not have enough. Do not throw things away that are still good just because you want something better. The Baby Boomer generation hated the “There are kids starving in China” line, but that is only because the television spent more time raising them than their parents. An entire generation was hijacked by Madison Avenue to go against everything every adult ever tried to instill into their young.
We have had it drilled into our heads that individual decisions and actions do not matter, but they do. They matter because values matter. This was never in contention until radio and television and the internet ushered in a new value system that served advertisers. It was a value system that was in direct opposition to what every parent tried to instill into their children until the time when advertisers had more influence on children than their own parents. That shift happened about the time when I was a child and television had established its place in American households. Let us be clear that what was established was an usurpation of corporate values over human values. It is the difficult but necessary task of each of us to overturn the values coup and reassert human values once more.
The values we live by in our everyday lives have a ripple effect. They change not only the way we live our individual lives but also the way we perceive how society should be run. We need to live our values in order for them to be translated into society at large. The big changes society needs, which we know it needs, will not come about of their own accord. They will not come about when the right people are elected or the right technology becomes available. And it sure won’t come about through the media. It will come about when people live out simple but timeless values.
It’s time to take the stinky garbage bag of corporate values to the curb.
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