The dilemma of finding values and identifying what is truly valuable in the 21st century.
This Monday earlier in the evening, I read a couple of posts from my friends @tarazkp and @denmarkguy that I found very interesting for the times that run and I suspect that you would also be interested in reading.
In short, I think both articles talk about the same thing. Although probably from different perspectives. But basically on the same topic. About the value of things. What we find truly valuable in our life and what we and society in general assign some value to nowadays. Here's Taraz post and Here's Denmarkguy post.
But what I really couldn't help but remember while I was reading their posts, was that both articles reminded me about an old essay written by the well known and famous Uruguayan writer and author Eduardo Galeano.
This in particular is one of many articles written by Galeano that presumably was created in the early 21st century. But that for reasons of my age and being more or less of the same generation of which he speaks in his writing, that's why I understand him very well and I've never been able to forget what he describes there.
I've been looking on the internet trying to find if this article already existed publicly translated into English. But apparently there are none. At least not one that I could find. So, I decided to translate it myself to share it with you here.
And among other things, because I think that this article of Galeano also deserves to be immortalized in the immutable blockchain. So, I hope you can excuse me for my bad translation. But for those interested in reading the original writing in Spanish and translating it by yourselves, you can click on the image below and on the headline in green right next below the image. And without more ado, Enjoy!!
¡I fell out of the world and I no longer know where to enter!
What happens to me is that I can't go around the world throwing things away and changing them for the following model just because someone thinks of adding a new function or reducing it a bit.
Not so long ago, with my wife, we washed the children's diapers, hung them on the rope next to other clothes, ironed them, folded them and prepared them to be soiled once again...
And they, our children, just grew up and had their own children, they were in charge of throwing everything away, including diapers...
They unscrupulously surrendered to the disposables...!
Yes, I know...
Our generation always had a hard time throwing things away...
Not even the waste was very disposable...!
And so we walked through the streets keeping the snot in the cloth pocket square...
I'm not saying that it was better...
What I'm saying is that at some point I got distracted. I fell out of the world and now I don't know where to enter again...
Most likely, what is now is fine, I do not dispute that...
What happens is that I can't change the stereo once a year...
The cell phone every three months, the computer monitor every Christmas or the TV set every year...
I come from a time when things were bought for an entire life...
What is even more!
They were bought for the lives of those who would come after of us...
People inherited wall clocks, bicycles, cameras, glass sets, tableware and even basins...
I read the other day that more garbage has been produced in the last 40 years than in all of human history...
We throw away absolutely everything...
There is no longer a shoemaker who mends a shoe, no mattress maker who shakes a mattress and leaves it as new, no sharpeners on the street looking for knives to sharp or a tailor to make cloth repairs...
I come from 'out there', of a time when all that existed nothing was thrown away...
It does not mean it has been better...
It is not easy for a poor guy who was educated with the mindset of 'save and save that sometime later it can be used for something', to go to the 'buy and throw away that the new model is coming...
You have to change the car every 3 years because if not, you are someone broke...
Even if the car is in good condition...
And you have to live in debt forever to pay the new one!!!!
But Oh My God...
My head doesn't hold that long...
Now my relatives and my friends' children not only change their cell phone once a week, but also change the number, email address and even the real address...
And 'they' prepared me to live with the same number, the same woman, the same house and the same name...
They raised me to save and kept everything...
What worked and what did not...
Because one day things could work again...
Yes, I know, we had a big problem:
They never explained to us what things could be useful to us and what things could not...
And in our constant eagerness to save (because we were educated to pay attention to traditions) we kept even the navel string of our first child, the tooth of the second, the kindergarten folders of all of them and the first hair that they cut to our childs at the hairdresser...
How do you want me to understand those people who give up their cell phone a few months after buying it?
Could it be that when things are easily achieved, they are not valued and become quickly disposable with the same ease with which they were achieved?
At home we had a cabinet with four drawers.
The first drawer was for tablecloths and kitchen towels, the second for cutlery and the third and fourth for everything that was not tablecloths or cutlery...
And we kept it....
We kept! even the caps of the soft drinks, the corks of the bottles, the keys that brought the cans of sardines...
And the batteries...!
The batteries which often went from the freezer to the roof of the house...
Because we didn't really know if we had to give them heat or cold so that they could live a little longer...
We weren't resigned to the end of its useful life in a couple of uses...
Things weren't disposable...
They were storable....
The newspapers!
They were good for everything...
To make templates for rubber boots, to put on the floor on rainy days, to clean glass, to wrap things.
The things we learned of a result by reading the newspaper attached to a piece of meat or unwrapping the eggs that the neighborhood grocer had meticulously wrapped in a newspaper.
And we saved the silver paper from chocolates and cigarettes to make Christmas decorations...
And the pages of the old calendars to make framed pictures...
And the medicine droppers in case some medicine didn't have the dropper...
And the used matches because we could reuse them with another candle already lit...
And the shoe boxes that became the first photo albums...
We straightened the nails to reuse them later...
And the decks of cards were reused even if some cards were missing, with the handwritten inscription on a jack of the sword that said 'this is a 4 of clubs'....
The drawers held left pieces of clothespins and the metal hook...
With the time, some right piece will appear waiting for its other half to become a complete clamp again...
We had a hard time declaring the death of our objects...
And today, however, they decide to 'kill' them as soon as they appear to stop serving...
And when they sold us ice cream in glasses whose lid became the base, we put them to live on the shelf of glasses and goblets...
Peach cans became flowerpots, pencil holders and even telephones.
The first plastic bottles were transformed into ornaments of doubtful beauty and the corks waited patiently in a drawer until they found a new bottle...
And I bite myself not to make a parallel between the values that are discarded and those that we preserved...
I'm dying to say that today not only appliances are disposable...
That marriage and even friendship are also disposable...
But I will not be imprudent in comparing objects with people...
I bite myself to not talk about the identity that is being lost, of the collective memory that is being thrown away, of the ephemeral past...
The morality that is being discarded if it is just about making money...
I am not going to do it...
I'm not going to mix the subjects. I'm not going to say that they have made the perennial out of date and they made the outdated perennial...
I am not going to say that the elderly are declared dead as soon as they confuse the names of two of their grandchildren, that the spouses will be changed for newer models as soon as the belly of one of them falls, or one of them has a new wrinkle...
This is just a chronicle that talks about diapers and cell phones...
Otherwise, if we mixed things up, I would have to seriously consider handing over my wife as part of payment for another with fewer kilometers and some new functions...
But I am slow to go through this world of replacements and I certainly run the risk that she will win me out of hand and I will be the one delivered in exchange of a newer and more attractive model.
I'm from 'THAT' era too and enjoyed being reminded of the many differences in the ways we attached value to items not commonly practiced in todays world; making such good use of salvaged/saved articles on a regular basis.