Quality versus crap.

Todd William has a good essay pointing out the importance of human creative invention throughout history. The accumulations created and left for us by past expert craftsmen and artists help to create our cultural and physical reality today, however, we also have today an over-abundance of machine made objects that serve no honest long-term purpose! Most of today's inventions serve only as products to maintain a corporate economy. The producers and marketers of this junk, profit only if the item is purchased by so called "consumers" and rendered useless within six months. This helps to keep the economic machinery functioning. So called "New" products quickly replace the older products. It also creates a danger to the planet!

 The concept of consumerism where you market and destroy has got to change! Mass marketed products created as disposable "consumer" items are filling up garbage land-fill sites faster than our human ability to recycle and re-use. The pollution is incredible! Nature cannot tolerate the sustained pressure on its Bio-system! We can create work for people without creating more junk and more environmental devastaton! Today we do need Artists and Artisans and Inventors creating long lasting products for future generations but what we do not need is more Madison Avenue planned mass marketed corporate junk creating pollution! Visit the http://www.Storyofstuff.org  for a better understanding.

Joseph Raglione.

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Todd William

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The Accumulation of Humanity

Two centuries ago, Sam Smiles made the observation that we would have "remained uncivilized but for the savings and accumulations made by our forefathers - the savings of skill, or art, or invention, and of intellectual culture." This remains as true today as it did then.

Nearly every physical item you use began as a thought in other people’s minds. Look around your home. Your table, your chair, your bed, your electronics, your car, even your house, all of it was invented by someone other than you. And you have never met any of these people.

This notion isn't limited to physical items. The language you speak, the manner in which you communicate, even the way you prepare your food was mostly someone else's idea. What exactly have any of us contributed to this?

There is no harm in admitting we all benefit from society in some way. Even history's most notable minds at best added only small increments to the massive ocean of human ideas. As great a mind as Isaac Newton was, he slept on a bed he didn't invent and under a roof he didn't design just like we all do.

The point isn't to drop everything and find a way to start contributing, as worthy as that might be. What's important here is that even though we should praise self-sufficiency and individuality, none of us should ever overlook the tremendous value we all gain by merely being a part of humanity



(Image by: Jean-François Rauzier)

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