Cycle of Crap

It must be summer, because I got the out-of-nowhere urge to cull my 5-year old’s closet for the high-waters and faux three-quarter sleeve shirts that have even the DADs commenting, “She’s kinda outgrowing her clothes, isn’t she?”

Our neighbor’s daughter is the lucky recipient for our 10-year old Gap and Gymboree classics whose paper-thin knees I hoped would survive at least two more wash cycles. When I finally clear them out, I take another look around her room and realize the work has just begun.

There’s more Bisphenol A (or is it B?) plastics in red and blue and yellow than there is floor space; a rainbow of colors and shapes stuffed into rectangular toy chests as a pretense to organization that is really the fallout of Goodwill’s ‘no more toys’ policy.

I tell the older kids we don’t need to buy more ‘stuff’ (‘plastic crap’ when Cameron’s not in the room) and that birthday presents only add to the losing battle of absorbing “activities” into our closets, let alone our daily lives.

Pre-recession, we were told to sprint along in a buy and binge race, tossing aside our undesirables without a care for the energy required to make them or the century-long half-life of cotton/poly fabrics in our landfills. The ‘downturn’ is an excuse for me to take stock of what we have, what we need, and most notably, what we can do without. Any economic principle requiring us to rekindle the same mad desires for unencumbered consumerism is one best left behind.

But do we need some things.

Let’s try more Peace. More Kindness. Let’s redefine our gross domestic product to allow for these contributions, not the spitting out of bubble-wrapped battery toys to cycle through the 6-month lifespan of closet to trash.

Let’s turn off this engine of useless shit and remember who we are: a society that wants people fed, clothed, educated, and respected.

That’s a GDP I can live with.