Good Luck With That

We don’t have cable or satellite, but in between episodes of The Colbert Report and The Daily Show streamed from ComedyCentral.com on Brandi’s laptop, we have been known to watch the occasional 80s flick from my collection of bargain DVDs. Brandi has a second hand TV she got from a friend, an old tube behemoth that weighs a ton, which has been sitting on the floor in a corner of the living room. We have talked about getting some sort of stand to put it on ever since she moved into the place, but the floor was working out well enough. That is until we got dissed by a six year old.

Our friends Jake & Lisa Pintok were over the other night for pizza and a game of Balderdash. Their young boys Ashton, Zachary, and Andrew came along as well. After a couple rounds of rather imaginative Balderdash answers, Lisa put a video on the television. This was an attempt to distract either the boys or Brandi & I; we’re still not sure which, as it was equally successful with both groups.

Before the video began, Zachary gave us all a concerned look. Since he had eaten most of his pizza and hadn’t injured one of his brothers in a while, everyone was curious as to what might be the problem. When Lisa asked him what was wrong, Zach’s answer was, “Their TV is on the ground.”

Fact was we had wanted to get a stand for the TV from the beginning, but we were trying to be responsible about it. Did we need a stand? Obviously, from Zach’s comment, yes we did. So much for reduce. We looked at all the second hand stores in town and watched craigslist; no luck. Okay, no love for reuse or recycle either. Wal-Mart was looming, but I wasn’t ready to give up yet, even if it meant suffering kinks in our necks from watching our ground bound television all winter.

Myself, I believe one of the central tenets of responsible consumerism and conservation is to obtain as much as possible from local sources. We live in Western Montana and there are trees everywhere. Let’s build a TV stand ourselves, I told Brandi. We spent her lunch hour drafting up some plans and took a Saturday trip to the lumber yard. Sure we could build it, we discovered, but not only did I not have the tools for the job, wood alone would cost us twice what we would pay for a pre-fab TV stand at Wal-Mart.

Now, I’m sorry, but this is too much to bear. I don’t care how you measure it; if you think this is the most economical way of doing business, your math is flawed. There is simply no chance that cutting trees in Canada, making particle board from them, shipping this wood to China, manufacturing a TV stand out of it, and then shipping the TV stand back to Montana is less expensive than it would be to cut trees in the Bitterroot, mill lumber in Darby, truck it to Hamilton, and have me bang together a funky TV stand on my own. Even if the math supported it, which I’m sure it doesn’t, it makes absolutely no sense to do things this way.

We need to change our business model if we are ever going to overcome the hurdles facing this nation and this world, this generation and those to come. The product path I describe above sounds ridiculous, but it is the reality more often than not. Given tax laws, wage disparities, and cheap fuel costs, I’m sure it appears profitable in the short run, but it is not viable over the long term. Not only that, it is irresponsible; economically, environmentally, and socially. It takes advantage of foreign workers, it wastes resources, and it robs from the local community. It may have worked for a time, but that time has passed.

Certainly, we could have lived without the TV stand. I’m not going to argue that point. The best thing we could have done is just ditch the TV altogether, but sometimes it’s good to temper the ideal with reality. Given the TV stand, the point I want to make is that I live in the woods alongside a bunch of loggers and carpenters who are unemployed due to a failing economy, and I can’t even find a TV stand made from local hands out of local lumber. Instead, thanks to poor mathematics and smoke & mirror financial deceptions, it makes more sense that I buy one made in China from Canadian pulp wood.

All I can say is: good luck with that. If you need me, I’ll be watching Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.