From one of my favorite blogs, SweetJuniper.com:
I do see this economic climate as an opportunity for change. It is a chance for us all to step back and think about where the things we buy are made, and all of what that means. It is a chance to accept that much of what we consider wealth isn’t even real. If we’re going to spend $700 billion to bail out those greedy firms who successfully used chicanery for years to manufacture an economy built of lies, shouldn’t we also spend $25 billion to save one of the few remaining industries that actually design, engineer, and manufacture something real and necessary in this country?
Jim/Dutch has such a gift for expressing even complicated things in such a passionate way that always resonates with me. He talks about the satisfaction of making things yourself, which is sort of what I was getting at in my “skills to collect” post a little while back. It’s hard to say where we, as a country, should be focusing our efforts. When it comes down to it, it’s probably more satisfying to put your hand on the hood and admire a car you’ve produced than it is to look back on an ephemeral financial transaction. But which really has greater value in the current global economy? On an individual level I’m all about growing food, baking bread, knitting and making preserves, but do we as a nation, sell ourselves short by sticking to pursuits that seem to be undervalued? Then again, is giving up a manufacturing capability — the capacity to make something that we’re still consuming — something we’d end up regretting?
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