:: in.a.mirror.dimly ::

When I was fifteen years old, my dad purchased an unfinished furniture set for me, picked up some stain and sandpaper, and set me to work on it. I wasn’t too enthusiastic about sanding and staining my dresser, night stand, and mirror, and so he often prodded me to keep working on it.

He promised me that I could take it with me when I moved into my own place, and I did. In fact, we still have that set. We also own several other pieces of furniture and household items with similar, if not better stories.

Then again, we also own things with stories such as, “I bought this desk at Staples,” or “We bought this lamp at IKEA.” Many of those things are either damaged or broken, though I don’t necessarily regret some of those purchases. 

While a purchase from a large retailer is sometimes necessary from the standpoint of a budget or the available options in one’s area, every morning I take clothes out of my dresser I have an opportunity to remember that conversation with my dad, to say nothing of my wife’s dresser that my father-in-law sanded down and finished for her.

Buy a Good Product

Our friends have taught us the value of buying household items that are unique and of high quality. They have built their own book shelves, picked up hand-crafted cutting boards, and commissioned a potter to make their dinner plates. While we eat on our scratched up Pfaltzgraf plates, they have sturdy plates that will last longer than our own and come with a great story.

Buying a good story and a good product isn’t possible for every single thing, and I believe that we have sometimes harmed the local movement by demonizing everything we buy from Wal-Mart or Target. In Vermont Local First groups challenged us to buy 10% of our products locally, which provided a good place for almost everyone to start.

Even this small percentage made a positive impact in the local economy, made buying local seem realistic, and actually encouraged me to increase my local purchases once I found higher quality goods in local stores and formed relationships with merchants.

Buy a Good Relationship

As a Christian I believe that we have a very relational God. Scripture moves humanity toward intimacy with God, and it’s no mistake that the Bible begins and ends in very personal settings in gardens. Jesus modeled a way that is very connected with others and

Perhaps one of greatest problems with our consumer society is the impersonal nature of our economy that disconnects us from the people who produce and sell our products and food. When I get to know the potter who makes the gifts I buy or the artists who create the paintings in my home or craft the shelves, I not only buy a quality product and foster a good story. I also make a personal connection and begin a valuable relationship.

This relational connection is one of the ways we can counteract the harmful cycles of exploitation that come about when the market demands lower prices. Trusting relationships are an excellent foundation for sustainable economies.

A Plan for Buying a Good Story

We can’t create a good story for everything we want to buy. In fact, we can’t. We need to be realistic about our financial and local limitations.

However, here’s a thought, until you have an opportunity to purchase something meaningful and memorable, why not make do with an inexpensive version from a yard sale, flea market, or Good Will store? In fact, the hunt may become part of the stories that you integrate into your home. Our kitchen table is a good example of this.

While living in the Philly area we drove by a yard sale at a big, fancy home. The trick with yard sales at such homes is that you can often find some great stuff, but unfortunately a lot of wealthy folks aren’t familiar with the bargain-hunting mentality of yard sales. However, we found a nice wood table with six chairs listed for $60.

The lady there wanted to get rid of it. She helped us load the chairs into our car. The husband, who came out after we wrote the check, was shocked she’d sold the table for so little. That little story became part of our permanent table, even though we just expected it to be temporary.

When we moved to Connecticut we sold that table and began to hunt for another—something that I must credit to my wife. That search took us through three states before we found the perfect table in the Salvation Army down the road from our house.

While it took more time to hunt for our table, we found a nice, cheaper, and more sustainable table at Salvation Army rather than driving to Wal-Mart and picking up a more expensive table that was manufactured in China. There may be times when Wal-Mart is our only option, but given a choice, I’ll take the nicer table with the better story.

We have a choice. Our lives are richer when we integrate stories and relationships into our purchases. We may accumulate less and spend a bit more, but there’s really nothing wrong with that.

I used to live 15 minutes from a naval air force base. Large military escort planes often hummed over our neighborhood, and some evenings I would drive by as they swooped in over the road. All around the base a series of shopping malls and various businesses offered everything a military base could need.

Over the years the local politicians debated the wisdom of having a military base on the edge of Philadelphia. Throughout the region similar debates cropped up from time to time about similar bases.

More often than not, the bases remained open. While some could make an argument for each base’s importance and function in the grand military scheme of things (though a “naval” base north of Philly strikes me as a hard sell), the loudest and most repeated argument proposed for keeping the bases was the local economy.

“If our little Naval Air base closed down, the local businesses around the base would experience a loss in business and put a lot of hard-working Americans out of work.” So we almost always kept the bases, kept spending our tax dollars on them, and kept folks employed.

A few years later, I began to notice that a lot of my friends had fathers who worked for a local business that built all kinds of stuff for the military. In fact, one of these companies still employs thousands of people in the Philadelphia area, doing business in both the civilian and military sectors.

A few years after that I began to notice that a lot of scientific research at universities is also funded by the United States Defense Department—which used to be aptly named the “War” Department. Some folks at universities can’t talk about their research projects from time to time because they are classified.

These scattered memories came to mind while I watched several commercials during the World Series that aim to support our troops and their families. It’s a nice sentiment to wish them well with the fast approaching holiday season and to pray for their safe return to their families.

However, while we may sing Christmas carols about peace on earth, pray for the safety of our soldiers, and the coming of the Prince of Peace, the three examples above hint that the stability of our economy depends on none of those things taking place. We need our soldiers to be placed into harm’s way even as we wish them the best. We need wars, we need enemies, and we need a military to fight them all so that we can keep our bases, businesses, and overall economy running.

I’m not willing to say that we need to scrap the entire military of the United States. Every secular state needs to make provisions for national defense (though the nature of that defense is debatable). What bothers me is the way our nation’s economy depends so heavily on military spending, keeping our soldiers in harm’s way, even while we’re told to honor them and to wish them season’s greetings

We could invest more money into nation-building, diplomacy, education, and development, but we already have an economy that depends on defense spending, so it’s way more comfortable to keep manufacturing arms and tearing apart families through lengthy deployments. But don’t worry! We are united in the support of our soldiers and wish them a happy holidays.

That should make things better, right?

The truth is that America has become cowardly and defeatist in its approach to the economy and to innovation. We have bought into the fear that we can’t survive economically by supporting global education, development, and peace. War can be good for business, and so we stay addicted to it.

Save an unnecessary military base for the sake of local jobs? Absolutely. Pump money out to defense contractors as we continue our fight in Afghanistan and keep Americans working in the production of war material? Of course! Seek other options for global peace and local economic development?

Nah. Let’s just keep putting our soldiers in harm’s way.

We tell ourselves that our soldiers like being honored, even if they have to risk their lives, get exposed to carcinogenic explosives, endure post-traumatic stress disorders, and miss out on irreplaceable time with their families. The American soldier is no doubt courageous, but in the midst of honoring them we fail to discuss our nation’s cowardice, our unwillingness to make sacrifices, and our fear of changing our systems and economy.

Perhaps we are guilty of hiding behind the bravery of our soldiers because we fear being exposed for what we are. Before we rush to honor the sacrifices of our soldiers, perhaps we should first ask what we are willing to sacrifice.