The Next New Thing

My Mother was a true child of the great depression.  She lived in a rickety little cabin of unpainted boards in Virginia.  I remember watching, as a child growing up, her putting the little pieces of several used up bars of soap together in a pot to melt them back into one big new bar.  I’ve never forgotten that lesson.

We live in an era of materialism and waste that has proliferated to a level unheard of in human history.  We justify that computer full of rare earth elements tossed into the trash, because it would cost more in labor to fix it than it is worth.  We consider a three-year-old car ancient and a “clunker” that has to be replaced, and it gets traded off to a car dealer in Mexico.  Our cars cost what whole houses go for in many places in the world.  The landfills proliferate, the toxic waste dumps get added, and we all wonder if they will contaminate our water with all our trash.  I went on a fire in a landfill dump recently and wondered if it was even safe to breathe the smoky air around me as I drove my fire engine into the site. There is an entire island many miles wide in the Pacific Ocean where trash from our rivers and beaches around the world floats as the various currents meet.. 

I am not much better than most at this either.  I do try to recycle most of what I can like computers, bottles and cans but it barely scratches the surface of what I consume.  But what this waste says to me about our culture’s insatiable appetite for more of everything is troubling.  You barely buy an Ipad before it is obsolete and you “have to have the new model” yet much of the world lives in abject poverty and hunger.  Those of us with an abundance of possessions and all the new toys and trinkets are not all that much happier than we were without them, and we often turn to drugs, alcohol and other forms of release to search for happiness.  We can’t see that things don’t buy happiness.  True joy comes in knowing God and living in that peace and expressing his love to others.  It comes more from giving than it does from taking and using.  I’m not saying that abject poverty is a whole lot of fun, but I know all our excessive materialism isn’t the answer, either.