(This is Friday's post, just a bit early, because I'm at home and it's quiet and tomorrow is going to be a hectic research-day).

One of the things I've been thinking about over the past few days is how we view things, and how we view our connectedness to other people.

TChem linked this essay on her blog. There's one thing I disagree with (or rather, that I think the essayist didn't consider). I tried commenting about it on her blog, but I didn't do a really good job of it, partly because when the whole voluntary-simplicity movement comes up, I get all hung up in guilt feelings about how much I DO consume, and how much I like antiquing and shopping for books and things like that, and I spend a lot of time trying to justify that I'm not so bad by listing how many (or rather how few) pairs of shoes I own, and stuff like that.

And I do have to admit - I have certain "stuff" I like, and I feel a certain pain if that "stuff" breaks or wears out.

But whatever. I'm not perfect. But I guess I'm at least thinking about these things.

Anyway.

I think one thing the essayist didn't consider was that, although we probably do value "stuff" too highly in some ways (the news stories of kids shot for their athletic shoes; the stories of people killed because they don't give up their cars right away when a carjacker appears), we also - because stuff is so cheap - tend to UNDERvalue it in some ways.

A couple of examples.

In my neighborhood, there are a few families with kids. These kids seem to have a lot of toys. And a lot of the toys seem to get left out in the street, or left out in the rain (when they're not the rain-resistant kinds of toys like the Little Tykes houses). And neither the kids nor the parents seem too bugged by toys getting broken or destroyed - they just go out and buy new ones.

And when I was a first-year college student, there was a girl on my hall who was taking all of her winter clothes (when spring had finally come) to the trash bins on the hall. When we asked her about it, she said she didn't want to pack them up to take back home with her, and they were "out of date" anyway. (These were mostly things she had bought over the course of the school year). (One of the other girls on my hall and I arranged a guerilla raid on the trashcan and took all the stuff to a local thrift shop - we couldn't bear to think of clothes that had that much use left in them going to a landfill).

I think in both of those cases, people are valuing stuff too little - or rather, they are valuing the resources and the labor that went into that stuff too little.

True, cotton and wool and wood and things like that are 'renewable,' but it takes energy to process them. And energy to make new stuff. And energy to carry it to the store. It seems wrong to me to just blithely throw away - or fail to take care of in the first place - things that are perfectly good, and expect that you will be able to get new ones, simply because you're "tired" of the old ones.

I'm also thinking about this in light of the news - the six miners trapped by the cave-in. How many of us have EVER thought, when we flip a light switch or turn on the television, of the people who man the generators or mine the coal (and, like it or not, the majority of electricity in the US is still produced by burning coal.)

Perhaps we'd be quicker to turn off the light when we left a room, if we thought of the men who went under the ground at 5 am, 6 days a week, to get the coal to make the electricity? (I mean, if we're not already turning it off quickly because we're thinking of the light bill).

I don't know. I know I'm guilty of being unconscious of these things - when I blow out the seat of my field jeans and I need to get a new pair, I don't think of the lady in Bangladesh (or where-ever) who sewed them; after I've tried on 15 pairs and failed to find a pair that simultaneously fits in the hips AND the waist, all I can think of is, "Why don't they design the damn jeans to fit women who have waists smaller than their hips?"

And I do think we'd fall into a sort of paralysis if we thought about how our every action impacted others or impacted the environment.

But - perhaps it's a good idea to think sometimes of the people and the resources involved when we're making choices.

There's a Buddhist proverb that goes something like, "It takes 99 people to supply your food," meaning that there are all these behind-the-scenes things we don't think about - from the people who cultivate the fields to the ones who breed the plants to the ones who harvest and the ones who truck it to the stores - that are responsible for the whole world working.

I tried to find the exact quotation of that - I thought I had it in a little book of ecumenical table-graces that I own, but I couldn't find it in the book. However, I found a Scots grace that expresses a very similar sentiment:

"No ordinary meal - a sacrament awaits us.
On our tables daily spread.
For men are risking lives on sea and land
That we may dwell in safety and be fed."

I think, perhaps, the cheapness, the wide availability - the, if I may, PLETHORA* of stuff - sort of deadens us to it. We get a feeling of entitlement - "of COURSE I need more stuff; I DESERVE it."

And one thing I've noticed is that a sense of entitlement often seems to drive out a sense of gratitude. (And it's probably the same way with food. From watching the kids at Youth Group - and I'm not talking about kids with food allergies or medical problems - but the way some of them reject food they're served, just because it's not the preferred brand or because we don't happen to have ranch dressing that night...well, these are kids who really haven't known hunger.)

So, I think in addition to not valuing stuff too highly - in the sense of making our stuff little idols, or putting its importance over people or peace or space - we also need to not value it too LITTLE, and let it become just part of the landscape, something we expect, something we're "supposed" to have, something that's made for us by "people who aren't us" in some country far away where they're "happy" to work for scut wages.

I think perhaps people who "make stuff" - whatever that stuff may be - may have a little bit of an inoculation against this attitude. If you've ever baked bread, if you've ever sewn so much as a t-shirt, you are kind of aware of the labor involved. And I have to admit I'm kind of amazed and dismayed when I read about how many copies of a t-shirt - or whatever - a person working in one of those factories has to make in a day to earn their bread.

So, maybe sometimes it's good to stop and think, if not about the THING, about the resources and the labor that went into it. And then think twice about what you're going to do with the thing when you're "tired" of it, or if you can't use it any more. It seems an awful waste to send useful things to a landfill if there's even a chance that someone out there would want to use it...

(*"Plethora" always makes me think of "The Three Amigos," where El Guapo is having his birthday and he remarks on the "plethora" of pinatas)