Small up!

This is a Jamaican expression for make room for more people, as in a crowded taxi. I like the term. But I am liking it more and more as the idea catches on the less is more. In the 60s when the book "Small is Beautiful" cam out, we were already hearing warnings about ecological disaster, about the population exploding, mutterings about global warming. In the 70s we had the gas crisis for a bit. We knew about the rainforests being decimated. This was a long time ago. Nothing that is going on can be surprising. We had warning after warning.

This is one place where my generation more than fucked up, failed, bombed. We played the fiddle while Rome was burning. We carried excess and greed to astonishing heights. OK, we helped get back to more natural childbirth, we made some decent attempts at recycling, we got a nature foods trend going, we stopped nuclear power plant growth in the USA. Good things. But we became the champions of exploiting resources and people and the environment. We owned stocks in hateful companies with murderous practices, we had to have more of everything, more cars, more bigger houses.

A lot of the people running companies and the government now are my generation. We don't take care of the environment. We don't care if everybody shoots everybody. We support hideous wars and call them peace makers. We changed the rules so that companies have more rights than people.

We talk a good story but we go one wasting everything we have been given. We have no apparent intention of curbing our wasteful ways. There is no idea of sacrifice or pulling in or smalling up. Who are we? Now  see more and more about tiny homes and ways to make it simpler. But for most people I know this idea appeals to them as another dwelling. And extra space where they can go to gt away from their shit. Maybe we should leave our stuff in the house and live in the storage continer.

Whole countries have had entire populations switch to low flush toilets, motion sensitive lighting, wind power, on demand water heaters, no plastic bags...simple changes if there is a will. Not in the USA. We still leave whole huge areas lit up at night like a stadium (car lots) when other countries have never dreamed of doing such a dumb thing. Who are we?

We are the people who have storage places for crap we never want to deal with. We are the country who had to add Hoarding as a mental diagnosis. We are the people who kill each other to buy crap at WalMart to celebrate Thanksgiving and get a jump on Christmas. 

Now, one thing that occurs to me is that if this state of affairs was making us wildly happy and sublimely contented and generous to a fault with those who have less, then it might be worth trying to sustain it. That isn't exactly the picture I see. We need antidepressants by the truck load. We seem to need a lot of guns. Who are we?

I am fully a part of the generation that ruined the environment and broke up the family and had to do what I wanted to do because I deserved it and  I earned it and I knew best. How can we turn this around? We canstart by smalling up where we can.