We don't value "things" at all...

I had a hard time falling asleep.  I thought I would have welcomed sleep, as I have been sickish lately, but it didn’t happen.  Maybe it was all that nutritional yeast on my popcorn, or maybe I am really upset.  I was lying there thinking about our discovery today, wondering why I just couldn’t seem to let it go.  Ramona went outside to make her potion in the little playhouse, and found her potions had been emptied from her bottles.  She saw one of the carrots – the ones she made of air-dry clay and paint and little green plastic things that look like carrot tops – cracked and with the carrot top yanked out.  She showed them to me, very discouragedly. The dishes and bottles we had neatly arranged in the playhouse after scrubbing it down were strewn around the patio and a few things on the lawn.  The second carrot she had made was missing as well as the tops to the nice glass bottles my mother had recently given her for potion making.  The other day I saw my roommate’s daughter and a friend playing crazy-wild outside with the hose and hula hoops and some pans, but I didn’t pay much attention. I wish I had.  My roommate is out of town a couple days, so no way to deal with it now…  I keep telling myself that it is just a thing that kids do, it is just a little thing, but it keeps nagging at me.  It is upsetting to me.  It feels like a personal violation.  It feels mean.

I also keep telling myself not to care so much, they are just things…we are too attached to our things in this culture, right? But really we, in this culture, aren’t attached to our things at all.  We are attached to “having” things.  We might be attached to some vague sentimental memories that specific things bring back to us, but really Americans are mostly attached to having things and consuming things, not the things themselves.  New things, not old things.  We are so overwhelmed with things, cheap things, junky things, made to break things, that it actually takes some thought when it comes to valuing things.  Many people react by trying to get rid of things, and feel better for it.  A good Mexican friend of mine used to berate me now and again, about how we Americans don’t have a clue about value.  I since have slowly been opening my eyes to exactly what he means.  In the USA value is attached to costs (which rarely actually reflect any other sort of value), or the prestige or envy that our shiny possessions generate.   If we truly valued our new set of pots and pans, wouldn’t we use them gently and for decades? Wouldn't our garbage dumps be a little smaller? I proudly use the pan my mother gave me that she has been using for 21 years.  But at the same time I feel a tinge of embarrassment when I look around at all the shiny new pots in the houses of my peers (are they really my peers?). What happens to those useful “old” pots anyway? They get tossed so that we can buy something new and shiny.. Or is everything made so poorly now, and then washed so many times in the destructive dishwasher that 20 years is now a dream for a pot?  I miss the depressed rural economy in which I was born…houses full of gently used old things. Garages made into music and art spaces (not full of things that are only there for the purpose of "having.")

Did I get off track?  Yes, I feel a little violated.  Ramona looks up to her friend.  Again I return to the mind changing idea one of my professors once related, “The question is not what it is, but what does it do?”   What does this do?  Something that Ramona feels is important (making potion in her special bottles, using her hand made items for play) has been totally disregarded and decimated.  Something that she valued has been brutally unvalued by someone she admires.  I wonder what that does. 

And I wonder what to say when my roommate comes home. 

Maybe this is our All-American lesson in not valuing "things", but rather "having things".  I can just BUY new ones, right?