LILL's LIST

The automakers want Congress to loan them taxpayer money so that they can use it to get consumers buying cars again. Congress has already loaned money to banks and mortgage lenders, so that they can  “relieve the credit crunch” and get consumers borrowing money again. Am I missing something here?

Consumers borrowing money for house after house and car after car is what caused the current financial meltdown. What Congress, companies, lenders and consumers need to support is less consumerism, not more. Further, in my not so humble opinion, society needs to re-shift its focus in a big way away from consumerism towards a more sustainable model of living.

I grew up in the fifties and sixties when things took up a lot less space in everyone’s lives. We had one TV, one car and many people lived in the same house all through their childhood. Belongings and furnishings weren’t discarded for new ones like they are now.

I blame it on the invention and adoption of plastic, this rampant consumerism. Plastic things were cheap. It was actually cheaper to throw them away than fix them, if they could even BE fixed.

Somehow, this attitude expanded to include non-plastic items until we were throwing away almost everything as soon as the “new” wore off, as my father used to say. Now, we realize that plastic with all its toxins and dependence on oil isn’t the wonder that we thought it was way back then.

Isn’t it about time that we admit that neither is consumerism the wonderful thing we thought it was?  Especially in light of the unavoidable facts of global warming and what consumerism is doing to our planet, it’s time to call it a day for recreational shopping.

Instead, I feel strongly that we should turn our minds and energy toward creating a world that appreciates the environment and engenders a culture of nurturing people, instead of creating things that we don’t really need and can’t sustain.

There’s still time. Don’t panic. Whether you celebrate Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanzaa, Solstice (like us) or something completely different, there’s still time to come up with a present that is earth-friendly, homemade and frugal as all get-out.

But before you get out the fruitcake recipes, consider these options, which may be just different enough to please even the most persnickety family and friends. My favorite is something I received last year. It’s the present I’ve used the most and its recipient was in my thoughts every time I used it.

My friend gave me a beautiful old teapot that she got for a quarter at a thrift store. It was nice, but even nicer were the 100 teabags that came with it. They were half organic black tea and the other fifty were various herbal blends. The really neat part of the whole thing is that she had removed the tags from every one and wrote her own little taglines.

It is SO neat to pull out a “Cold Cure” teabag when I’m feeling kind of stuffed up and read: “Let my warm thoughts fill your heart while this hot tea chases your cold away.” It’s almost like my friend is sharing a cup of tea with me at my kitchen table. I swear it intensifies that medicinal power of the tea.

You could let your kids help you write the tags for relatives and friends who would love to hear from them – and you – but live at a distance. What grandmother wouldn’t love a cup of tea with her grandson’s red heart and an “I love Grandma” on the tag hanging over her cup?

If you’re not into tea and sympathy this holiday season, how about letting the kids decorate a plain white cloth bag for earth-friendly shopping? Or get some cheap stencils and do it yourself with a picture of Mother Earth or a brightly colored bird or a slogan like, “Save The Earth… BYOB” which stands for “Bring Your Own Bag”, of course.

There are so many free or very inexpensive – but really useful – gifts that you can make. There’s no excuse to give the same old tired crafts and knicknacks. Instead of candles, make them some gel air fresheners from jello or gelatin in pretty glasses you’ve found at yard sales or thrift stores. Here’s a recipe I posted last year.

Make a hanging air freshener with some cedar shavings from the local pet store and some essential oil. Put them into small cloth bags so friends and family can hang them up. Or for a gift that’s sure to be appreciated, find out what your friend or relative does that you can give them a gift for so that they don’t have to buy it themselves.

Do they feed the birds? Buy them the kind of bird seed or suet they use. Do they have a hobby that calls for supplies? Find out what they need and get them some. It’s a luxury not to have to buy the everyday things that eat up our budgets, and sometimes people are hesitant to spend money on hobbies or non-essentials this time of year. If you do it for them, there’s no guilt!

The most important part of homemade gifts is using your imagination and time to come up with something that is truly useful and that will be appreciated by the recipient. Homemade gifts have gotten a bad wrap, er, rap because so many times they’re just an excuse not to have to choose or pay for a present.

If you give someone something that was thrown together in haste, with very little thought, only to get out of buying something, your friend or family member might act pleased, but they’ll know it isn’t from the heart. That’s the most important part of gift-giving, whether it’s bought or made by hand. So, while there’s still time, think about what you have on hand or can buy inexpensively and figure out whether that will work for the folks on your list. If it doesn’t, head for the mall and don’t beat yourself up.

I almost always remember to bring my fabric bags when I shop, but one day last week, I found myself checking out without them. When the cashier asked if I wanted paper or plastic, I told her that I use the plastic bags for weatherstripping my basement doors. She was somewhat taken aback, but she gave me several extra bags and said she’d pass the idea along to a friend who has drafty doors.

I’m frugal, so this is only one of the many little ways I save money by not buying things that I can get for free. If you think about it, there are a lot of things that we accumulate without even trying, and many of them can be used for other purposes. Like those little foam trays that veggies and meat come to us on. My daughter’s teacher at the home-school co-op tells me that they make nifty block printers for the kids. They also make neat stencils, because the foam is thick enough to hold onto and trace around without breaking.

We have a neighbor who used a car wheel to make a windmill, but I’m not quite that handy. (Neat idea, though.) However, I have used old car tires, piled up,  to help my son learn parallel parking, along with some trash barrels with rakes and shovels sticking out of them. If he hit them, they’d just fall over and wouldn’t hurt the car.

We use old sheets to cover the veggies when frost threatens. When they get threadbare and stained, wash cloths become napkins for pizza night. Why use paper ones or dirty our good napkins? Son knows how to make spoon rings out of thrift store spoons. Daughter uses old shoe and cereal boxes for “houses” for her stuffed critters and also makes them clothes out of old socks.

I bet if we all looked around we could come up with a lot of ingenious ways to reuse things. That’s what people did during the 30′s and many people who lived through the Depression kept that frugal habit. It’s not only practical, it’s good for the earth. The more things we reuse, the fewer things we’ll have to make and that’s a good thing.

Note: I usually save the opinion posts for my other blog “News From Hawkhill Acres“, but with a a very important election coming up in less than a month, I think this post deserves to go here too.

I know I’m supposed to blog about the financial crisis because that’s the most important thing in the world at the moment, and I’ll get to it. First, though, I’d like to say a word about peace, or the lack of it, in the world. I’m sure someone will comment and say that I’m overreacting but I’m going to say it anyhow. Peace doesn’t have a chance in our culture.

Oh, sure, I’m still rooting for it and fighting for it and promoting it in the community I inhabit. I’m still trying to model it for my kids and create those famous ripples that will spread out from me and other peacemongers throughout the rest of the world until it replaces war, unrest and meanness.

Unfortunately, I’m outnumbered and outgunned by corporations and power brokers who realize that peace doesn’t sell. Even if you count the Nobel Peace Prize, there are many more medals for war heroes than peace heroes. Little boys don’t say that they want to grow up to be peacekeepers; they want to grow up to be soldiers.

Our TV shows, movies and books aren’t about peace and love; they’re about torture, sophomoric mean-spirited jokes and heroes who are good guys because they kill bad guys. Think of the shows that have everyones’ eyeballs glued to the screen every night. Is “Survivor” a show about how the human race has survived by cooperating? I don’t think so.

I think I really started to be worried about the world around the time that “Silence of the Lambs” became such a big hit. Hannibal Lecter is not a peacemonger. He’s a totally screwed up psychopath, but millions of people found him fascinating. They still do. I don’t. I can’t get past the horror his victims experienced. Whether in fiction or the real world, people who treat other people like objects or possessions aren’t people I want in my life.

But everyday on talk shows, on adult soap operas and “reality shows”, in sports and the entertainment industry, it’s not the peaceful, cooperative, decent people who are glorified, is it? Nope, it’s the loudmouthed, pushy, greedy, aggressive, mean, unethical egoists who get the publicity and the brand sponsorship, which makes them role models for millions of people, especially kids.

I’ve come to the conclusion that one reason peace is such a hard sell is because you just can’t make much money from it. True peace involves love for our fellow humans, the planet and the animal life on it. It means not consuming just for the sake of consuming. It means caring enough for others to pay them a decent wage, respect their inalienable right to do what they want with their own bodies and lives, and take care of them when they can’t care for themselves. Ain’t much return on that for someone who wants to be a millionaire, is there?

And that brings me to the current financial crisis and Ronald Reagan, who – if he were still alive – would be turning over in his grave. Well, you know what I mean. Ronald Reagan is still touted as the “father of the conservative revolution”, the man who got rid of those pesky regulations that hampered the free flow of money into the pockets of his rich cronies from trickling down from the rich to the poor.

Note to poor: If you’re still standing there with your bucket to catch the trickle, you can go back to the homeless shelter. Very rich people don’t let even a trickle of money get away once they have it in their hands. That’s how they get rich.

How anyone could believe that the party that gave us Ronald Reagan is the change this country needs, is beyond me, but many do. Oh, wait, I get it. They mean “change” as in nickels and dimes, which is what the Republican party has been giving us for two administrations now, along with an unjust war, repressive homeland security laws (just the term makes me squirm) and such things as “signing statements” which are nothing more than a violation of the constitution.

We need Change with a capital C and that’s what I’m voting for. I’m not naiive. I don’t think that electing Barack Obama will immediately right all the wrongs in this country. I don’t agree with him on a lot of things and I’m just as cynical about politicians as the next person. However, I still insist that peace is the goal, not war. Love, not hate.

If you feel that way too, please think about which candidate is more likely to work for the same goals. Put Mimi’s Peace Globe on your site and blog about peace on November 7th. Let’s give peace another chance. It’s the least we can do.

I grew up in the fifties. I can still smell the Sal Suds my mother used to use in the old ringer washer that we had. (Hey, it was a step up from washing the clothes in the zinc bathtub after boiling the water on the kerosene stove.) So, I was so happy when I found Sal Suds back in the 70′s when I first started to be more conscious of what I was putting into the environment.

My mother, however, was not into Sal Suds in the 70′s. She was into Tide with Bleach, Dawn Dishwashing Liquid and those little scrubbing bubbles that got the soap scum off the tub and looked so cute in commercials. Mom couldn’t understand why I wanted to “go backwards” as she put it, by using old-fashioned cleaning products when there were much more effective “modern” products available.

In vain, I tried to explain to her that decades of pouring chemicals and toxins into the earth’s water supply was having a horrible effect on our environment and our bodies. She didn’t want to hear it. “If it was dangerous,” she said, “They wouldn’t let them sell it.”

Well, Mom was wrong. It is dangerous and they did let them sell it, but I’m glad that I never bought into the whole “ring around the collar, bleaches whites white, get your dishes squeaky clean” wheeze. I’ve been using Sal Suds, biodegradable earth-friendly laundry soap, shampoo and dish soap since before my kids were born.

Somewhere along the way, a lot of other people joined in, until they’re now some of the hottest selling products in the world. Mom is gone, but I wonder if she would have gotten onto the natural products bandwagon if she had lived to see it.

After all, the reason she embraced the whole “better living through chemistry” idea was because she wanted to be “modern” and keep up with the times, as she put it. Well, nowadays, keeping up with the times often means going back to the basics.

I’m not against using modern technology, but I’m not going to just blindly accept it as good. Also, some of the old ways were discarded for a reason. I don’t think anyone wants to go back to using yellow lye soap for baths or laundry, and you won’t find me using iodine for cuts either.

But if something works and doesn’t harm the environment, humans or animals, why not use it? Actually, the Sal Suds works so well that I almost don’t need anything else. I even use it as a spot remover on my rugs and clothes.

The ingredients in Dr. Bronner’s Sal Suds are: Water, Sodium Lauryl Sulfate, Coco-Betaine, Lauryl Glucoside, Fir Needle Oil and Spruce Oil. While I’m not a fan of Sodium Lauryl Sulfate (SLS), Dr. Bronner’s label explains that their version uses Coco-Betaine and Lauryl Glucoside to counter the irritation that SLS can produce. Who am I to doubt them, especially since I use it and it doesn’t irritate my skin at all.

It’s not for slathering on your body. It’s for cleaning, laundry and removing stains. It works as well as more expensive, harsh chemical cleaners. I like the smell and I like the fact that it’s not wrecking the planet. Now, that’s modern.