Round two of Throw It Away.
Jul. 19th, 2009 06:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
agoodwinsmithI wrote this as a response to someone else's post, but I want to be able to find it again, so I am reposting it here:
Thanks for the 10 items if one becomes homeless.[1] Although we in Canada are not hurting like people in the States, we're all usually just one or two rent cheques away from no place to stay. Whenever my job has disappeared it has always taken me longer than that to find a new one.
Anyway. What I wanted to say was that the people I see suffering the most (other than those who are so far gone in addiction they are never coming back) are the people who have become trapped by their stuff, and push it around day and night in a grocery cart. Keeping things that might be useful *someday* is a trap.
And people throw away good things everyday. It is very easy, when one has nothing, to feel that some how this abandoned thing will be useful.
Hah. I'm struggling with this *useful thing* issue because we've had tight times and people have given us things they no longer want. I've never used them because I don't need them, and so I have moved them from house to house to house - and some of them have never been out of the moving box. But just throwing them away seems so wasteful - and ungrateful. But finding someone who can actually use these things has been and still is beyond my current power (no car).
I have reached my no-go point. I now have a week off from work and I am going to THROW AWAY perfectly good things that I haven't been able to find a home for. OUT.
Keeping things I don't use doesn't actually make me any safer from poverty.
[1] - http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090803/ten_things
Thanks for the 10 items if one becomes homeless.[1] Although we in Canada are not hurting like people in the States, we're all usually just one or two rent cheques away from no place to stay. Whenever my job has disappeared it has always taken me longer than that to find a new one.
Anyway. What I wanted to say was that the people I see suffering the most (other than those who are so far gone in addiction they are never coming back) are the people who have become trapped by their stuff, and push it around day and night in a grocery cart. Keeping things that might be useful *someday* is a trap.
And people throw away good things everyday. It is very easy, when one has nothing, to feel that some how this abandoned thing will be useful.
Hah. I'm struggling with this *useful thing* issue because we've had tight times and people have given us things they no longer want. I've never used them because I don't need them, and so I have moved them from house to house to house - and some of them have never been out of the moving box. But just throwing them away seems so wasteful - and ungrateful. But finding someone who can actually use these things has been and still is beyond my current power (no car).
I have reached my no-go point. I now have a week off from work and I am going to THROW AWAY perfectly good things that I haven't been able to find a home for. OUT.
Keeping things I don't use doesn't actually make me any safer from poverty.
[1] - http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090803/ten_things
