Plastic Pumpkins

The world is awash with plastic pumpkins, or for that matter, plastic anything.  What is it about replicating something in the real world with a facsimile of plastic?  We buy a lot of it.  Once past Halloween with its plastic jack-o-lanterns there will be plastic turkeys at Thanksgiving, artificial Christmas trees, and plastic eggs at Easter.  There’s a fake world out there filled with plastic pink flamingos, houseplants, turf, and styrofoam cups.  Why there’s even the time when two fellows stood looking at a beautiful young lady.  One said she got her looks from her father, he’s a plastic surgeon.

Plastic products are made for us to buy and make life easier because we can just toss them out when we’re done with them.  Like college professors do, they’ve come up with the five steps showing how raw materials move through the economy from extraction to production to distribution to consumption to disposal.  All along that line people work and make money.  But a problem has developed: raw materials deplete, factories pollute, landfills overflow, and huge masses of junk accumulate in the ocean.  As one said, “You can’t run a linear system in a finite world indefinitely.”  

People my age lived in a different world at one time.  We carved real pumpkins, bought Christmas trees where the needles dropped off, and drank from china cups.  If our television quit working, it was placed in the car and taken to a tv repair shop.  We needed to leave it there until the repairman got around to ordering the replacement tube.  In the meantime, we lived like we did before by reading, playing games, working around the place, or maybe writing letters by longhand to friends.  Most of the products we owned could be repaired.  When one stopped working, we fixed it.  

The little corner I call my office is spartan; just one photograph hangs on the wall.  It captured the moment when a Buffalo Pitts steam engine pulling a Nichols and Shepard Red River Special threshing machine has entered a fording area across the Sheyenne River just south of Anselm, ND.  They’ve stopped to pose for the photographer.  At the left is a buggy where one man is seated, probably the boss.  In the middle is the steamer belching smoke and steam with its trailing thresher.  Behind it is a filled bundle wagon, and to the right is a water wagon hitched to a mismatched team.

A crew of fourteen men can be counted standing or sitting in various places in this scene dated by the archived newspaper articles of July and August, 1901.  I have it hanging where it’s in full view to remind me of that period of our history where things weren’t thrown out.  They were repaired.  Most of the men in it were probably transients who had stolen rides in boxcars who owned only the clothes on their back.  Pay at the time was $2 per day when they could work, so extravagant spending was unheard of.  

This is not to say that I practice what I preach.  We recently purchased a fireplace for our home, and as might be guessed, it’s an electric model complete with plastic logs and fake flames that don’t give off heat.