I remember growing up as a kid in the 1960s and 70s and there was one corner of the basement that had some boxes stacked up with stuff that my mother called "memorabilia." Just a bunch of old plates, glassware, newspaper clippings and other knick-knacks.
Today, the average house is completely saturated with stuff. I bet I could find at least five old coffee-makers in my basement alone. That's because we always end up getting the latest and greatest gadget while putting the older perfectly well running gadget down the basement "just in case."
I never have figured out what "just in case" means. Just in case of yard sale? Just in case it might be worth something on Ebay as an antique? One thing for sure, we'll never actually lug it back up to the kitchen and actually use it. That's because if the one we are using breaks, we'll just go out and buy a new one and put that one down basement to join the others.
Just in case.
True.
The problem is we’re becoming slaves to our stuff...
I remember when a toaster or a waffle iron were important possessions, when a trip across America was a once in a lifetime thing, when people read the restaurant menu from right to left, when few teenagers had their own cars, when everybody had only one TV if that.
Remember when the grocery stores had only canned asparagus and only one kind of mushroom?
America's unprecedented prosperity brought about many wonderful things! Most notably the classless society of the great American bourgeoisie--the fulfillment of mankind's dearest dream.
The Civil Rights Revolution is certainly one of the most glorious and priceless results of American prosperity and its evolution into a classless society. It is doubtful that this Revolution would have occured as soon as it did--if at all--if America had remained impoverished. It was prosperity, based on capitalism, that made it all possible.
American prosperity also brought the world ever closer to the fulfillment of The American Dream: universal liberty, justice, and prosperity for all the people of the world!
However American prosperity has not been entirely beneficial. It seems that every silver lining is attached to a cloud.
It is probably this unprecedented prosperity that bred the spoiled, decadent American Left, whose foolishness today enables, encourages, and empowers America's foreign enemies and threatens the destruction of Western Civilization and the American Dream.
The spoiled, decadent Left wallows in anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and self-indulgence, including self-indulgent whims to favor the xenophilic, irrational, bizarre, and self-destructive.
Perhaps the rise of civilization to power and prosperity brings with it its own suicidal poison.
Probably at all times, within all societies, there are populations of the suicidal and populations of the ascendant and that at times of ascendancy the ascendant prevail, at times of decadence the suicidal. What's important is to fight the suicidal and strengthen the ascendant at all times.
That's our challenge today--defeating the Left, which is decadence itself.
A yard sale at your house might do the trick if you don’t like all that stuff filling your basement.
And a lot of crap simply gets thrown away, because either it has no intrisic value, or it becomes outdated/superceded/redundant.