The Good Old Days

We got our first microwave in 1976, before my brother who is now in his mid-thirties was born, and the darn prehistoric thing still works. It is giant and analog, with a dial instead of a digital readout, and doesn’t do anything except cook stuff, but it has lasted for more than three decades without needing a single repair. Nothing made today lasts like that. It is one of my big gripes--planned obsolescence, the intentional shoddy and temporary manufacture of even expensive things so that they only last a few years at best before needing to be replaced in a consumer-fixated culture. We pay thousands of dollars for cars made of plastic, hundreds of dollars for phones and computers which become ancient history before we can get them activated, and most of our disposable income (and sometimes far more) to replace things we didn’t really need in the first place with more stuff than we could ever need. And the old stuff goes in the dumpster and then the landfill. It’s even an end-of-school rite of passage here in Chico. Not that my corner of the world is immune. I go into the Dollar Store, thinking I’m being thrifty, and end up leaving with fifty dollars worth of complete crap without even really knowing how it happened. In David McPhail’s Ed And Me, a little girl has a long, loving relationship with the family truck, which still starts right up even after a freezing winter. Ah, the good old days.

http://www.amazon.com/Ed-Me-David-McPhail/dp/0152448888

http://www.eduplace.com/kids/tnc/mtai/mcphail.html