Stuff, nonsense and charity.

The more I think about it--and I try to think about it as little as I can--the more I come to believe that when the final story of America someday is written, the final few chapters will be a lesson on the dangers of waste, redundancy, profligacy and arrogance, with a little greed, jealousy, suspicion and envy thrown in for spice.

We Americans like to think of ourselves as “generous,” and to a degree we are--individually we give to churches and charities and sometimes even panhandlers at intersections; as a country we scatter money all around the world. When we’re in the mood, of course.

On my grandparents’ old homestead there is a pear tree that has stood in the same corner of the yard for at least as long as I’ve been alive, if memory serves. My grandparents died in the late 1990s, in their mid-to-late 90s, and my sister wound up buying their house and the four or five acres immediately surrounding it (another “carve-out”). To get back to the pear tree, it still bears fruit, some years lots of it, but generally the pears just fall to the ground and rot there, given that nobody wants to go to the trouble of picking them up and preserving them, etc.

Well, almost nobody. A couple of years ago some Amish folk who live nearby stopped and asked my sister if they could pick up the pears. No, she said, she was going to use them. Of course she wasn’t--she just didn’t want to give the Amish folks “something for nothing.” Somehow it is “better,” in her eyes, that the pears just rot away on the ground, than to “give them away” to somebody who might actually get some use out of them.

I can’t take any moral high ground, here. In one corner of my yard stands an empty grain storage bin. For no particularly discernible reason, the former owner of the farm this house used to be a part of decided when determining the boundaries of the carve-out that the bin needed to go with the house, whether the buyer of the house and the 1.6 acres immediately surrounding it was going to be doing any farming or not. A couple of people have inquired about buying it, but when I name the price suggested by an “experienced” farmer my dad knows, they back off.

What I SHOULD do is just give the structure to the first person who is willing to haul it off--I have NO use for it, now or in the conceivable future, and it’s not like I would be “losing” something in terms of actual cost--it just came with the property. If I can’t use it, I should just give it to someone who can.

Of course, if I did that, “everybody” would be talking about how stupid or gullible or naïve I was, to give something away that I might (in some alternate universe; it’s a 5000-bushel bin, virtually obsolete when most people want bins three times that size) get a price for.

It all comes down to ego, I suppose, plus deep-seated fear of “being taken advantage of.”

So the bin stands empty.

In the corner of the yard opposite, or actually catercorner--”catty-corner“--from the bin I have two black walnut trees, one of them a truly magnificent specimen whose branches hang heavy with nuts every year (the other, not so much). I WISH some of my Amish neighbors, or anybody else, would happen by and offer to harvest them--certainly I never will, and I LOVE black walnuts, it’s just too difficult and time-consuming to get at the meat of them. More waste, although I suppose in this particular case it has less to do with ego or anything else I named, above, than it has to do with simple laziness on my part.

Wholly different, yet the same, situation: A bunch of years ago I helped my brother and his wife move a 24-foot truckload of “stuff” from two storage facilities and a basement to another storage facility nearer to where they were going to be moving. Among many other things, what we boxed up and packed into the truck were hundreds of toys their children had outgrown. The toys are probably still in those same boxes, but in another storage facility a thousand miles away since my brother and his family were uprooted yet again by work.

There are probably a lot of kids in this country who could have gotten a lot of joy out of those outgrown and likely now forever packed-away toys. (Yo! Bro!? Ever hear of “Toys for Tots?” It makes the news every Christmas.)

Now multiply me and my sister and brother by thousands, or millions, and you might get some idea of unnecessary waste.

Funny thing is, giving away stuff that you no longer need is not particularly painful, aside from maybe “missing” just having it around.

In the process of moving up here almost three years ago, I was forced by circumstances and finances to take a very cold look at my possessions and decide what to move, what to chuck aside. For instance, I had a veritable library of books still packed neatly in the same boxes I’d packed them in, last time I moved--I had never even unboxed them. Without renting a moving van, which I couldn’t afford, I had no way to move them. So I hauled them all down to the doorstep of a woman running a used-book store. I got nothing for them, of course (the store wasn’t even open when I dropped them off), but when I stopped by to say goodbye to the lady, whose name was Michelle, a week or two later, she told me that she had already sold several of them. “Maybe they’ll pay the store’s light bill for the next couple of months,” I said--and I really hoped they would. Michelle was managing the business on a serious shoe-string.

Yeah, I gave Michelle “something for nothing.” But those books had been stored for seven years by that point, doing nobody any good at all. How much did it really hurt me to give them away? And if it helped her keep her bookstore open a little longer . . . ?

Gave my admittedly worn bedroom set to a local women’s shelter. I haven’t gotten around to missing it, but know that other people are getting good use out of it.

Gave a whole huge tub-full (at least 200) of DVD movies to a friend who was then unemployed and without cable or satellite TV, and know that he filled a lot of otherwise empty hours with them before he, in turn, gave them to the women’s shelter.

A year or so ago I sent a barely-out-of-the-box super-zoom digital camera that I never could “bond” with to a camera-less friend, a new mother, a thousand miles away. I wasn’t using it, never would use it--I was happy to get it out of here, in fact. She has taken thousands of pictures of her now 1-year-old with it.

None of this was about “charity.” It was all about utility, really. If you own something but have no use for it, give it the hell away to somebody who CAN put it to use, who CAN use it to somehow improve their own lives, if only in a very small way. How hard is that?