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by Robert Jawitz
This generation is witnessing the disappearance of quality
in almost every facet of our daily lives. The large corporate
supermarkets have supplanted the myriad of small shops that
used to be part of our culture; the bakeries, the fruit stand,
the neighborhood grocer, the cheese shop, the fish store and
now even the florist and the pharmacy. In the supermarket, in the thousands
of square feet of items, are all items of mediocrity. The breads are all soft
and tasteless. The cheeses are all bland. The tomatoes are too hard and the
bananas too starchy. The growers have bred them for transportation and shelf-life.
The corn is too old and flavorless. Fresh cider and fresh squeezed orange juice
is gone because of inflated fears of bacteria. There are aisles and aisles
of prepared foods with just an image of what good food should taste like. The
individual attention of the neighborhood stores is missing. Nobody knows how
to cook anymore. The old recipes handed down from generations past are gone.
Young people never even experienced good fresh cooking. Young people never
felt hand-made clothes or a hand-made afghan. The rugs are now machine made,
the kitchen-ware is machine-made, the furniture is mass produced, even the
art work is mass produced. Outside, our built environment is even worse. Our
houses, ranch style, so-called colonials and split levels, are devoid of individuality
and decoration. They are monotonously placed on tree-less streets with featureless
yards of toilsome grass. They are made of the cheapest materials; aluminum
or vinyl siding, plywood designed to mimic real wood, pressed wood windows
covered by a thin layer of plastic, thin asphalt shingles, and light fixtures
that fall apart if you pull on them too hard. There is Formica trying to look
like stone, vinyl flooring trying to look like tile, and pressed sawdust cabinets
with a vinyl surface made to look like wood. Our cities are not much better.
We have office buildings with miles of the same strip windows and “Dryvit” exteriors
made to look like stucco. Inside, we have “office landscapes” with
row upon row of “work stations” crowding each worker into 35 sf
of plastic or metal furniture. Working for these large corporations is just
as monotonous, everyone needing to fit the corporate culture, everyone needing
to look alike. Going to and from work is just as monotonous; stuck in traffic
on monotonous highways. Our leisure time is just as monotonous: Taking the
kids to soccer practice, cutting the grass, watching endless episodes of sit-coms
or “reality” shows, or playing golf on over-manicured over fertilized
grass.
All of this is a result of our corporate industrialized money-oriented
culture; a culture that has constant downward pressure for
wages and a corresponding requirement for the cheapening of
products. What we need in our culture and everyday lives is
food that is prepared with care and has taste, artifacts that
are hand-made and have a story, houses that are built to last,
have decoration and depth of beautiful real natural materials,
places to work that are populated with friends and structured
to our personal needs, gardens to work in rather than grass
to cut, and activities that are meaningful to our legacy of
life: creation, education and contribution. We need childcare
and eldercare provided by a loved one rather than strangers.
We need healthcare that is based on prevention of disease rather
than just on curing of disease. This can be achieved in a homestead
society, in smallness of government, small business and education
and in the appreciation of the arts. RMI supports and promotes
quality in our culture and everyday lives.
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