Slice of Lucy: Buy Local?

 

'Buy Local' Has New Meaning

For two days, I have been driving westward. My body aches from the long days at the wheel, but my mind is popping with new sights and lots of time to think. While plowing through Missouri and Oklahoma, the long highway stretching in front of me, I have navigated carefully around hundreds of semis, with just as many headed in the opposite direction. After logging hours and hours of this phenomenon, I am convinced of one thing: The ubiquitous demand for immediate gratification via 24-7 online shopping is too costly to support. 

I do not shop a lot, but I am willfully ignorant of the distance my orders travel. My mom's birthday was a few weeks ago. She asked for a glass white board to keep track of details that keep slipping her mind. I was happy to order it for her, but man, it took forever to get to our house. I was really frustrated that it spent several days in some warehouse in California before being shipped, and as a result, it arrived two days late. I'm sure you have had a similar experience, as have the millions of other online shoppers in this country. Amazingly, the stuff we order is usually delivered within two to three days; it is rare that it takes ten, as it did for this gift. 

I thought about that glass white board all day as I drove and drove and drove. 

After awhile, I did not just think about that white board traveling across the United States; I felt embarrassed that I pushed the button that launched its transnational voyage. When I thought about the white board's even longer voyage from its manufacturing site in China, I felt outrage that it was so incredibly easy to push the button, that whole systems have been designed so I do not think about the bigger picture of my consumer habits, that I became complicit in that system. 

Simply said, a birthday gift, even one for my mom, does not merit such an expenditure of energy and effort, not my energy and effort, by the way. I don't want to swear I will only buy local because I know my consumer habits are well-established and will take practice and intention to change. A blithe promise inspired by road trip observations will not achieve the change that is needed, but I am newly confused, disgusted, and disappointed by the gross reality of consumerism. Driving the route my mom's white board took has brought me some clarity.