cheap crap breaks

On Thursday afternoon, we shut the front door after coming inside from a walk. And our bookshelf promptly cracked and toppled over for no obvious reason, other than that it was made of crap.

At another time, I might have said "Oh no!" and rushed to try and prop it back up again. But we just looked at each other with a look that said, "Figures." We took a picture. And then we made some lunch.















We had just come home from a neighbor's house, where we had watched The Story of Stuff—a cute little animation on the process of industrial production and consumption. You can watch it HERE. While the 20-minute video oversimplifies its issues a bit, it's entertaining. And it includes this little guy, who got me thinking:













You gotta wonder if some people in the Thanksgiving stampede last year were actually performing a highly spiritual, sacrificial ceremony to make them worthy of the stuff they bought.

I looked at the article that the cartoon man wrote. I'm not sure if he's saying that's how he thinks things SHOULD work. Or if he's just observing that this is how our current system DOES work, like it or not. Either way, his quote changed my point of view long enough to prevent my otherwise-predictable freak out when the bookcase keeled over.