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But now I have been through hundreds of towns and cities in every climate and against every kind of scenery, and of course they are all different, and the people have points of difference, but in some ways they are alike. American cites are like badger holes, ringed with trash - all of them - surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered with rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountains of thing we throw away are much greater than the things we use. In this, if in no other way, we can see the wild and wreckless exuberance of our production, and waste seems to be the index. Driving along I thought how in France or Italy every item of these thrown-out things would have been saved and used for some- thing. This is not said in criticism of one system or the other but I do wonder whether there will come a time when we can no longer afford our wastefulness - chemical wastes in the rivers, metal wastes everywhere, and atomic wastes buried deep in the earth or sunk in the sea. When an Indian village became too deep in its own filth, the inhabitants moved. And we have no place to which to move.

To round out buy nothing day I'm posting this clip from Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck, written in the fall of 1960. When I read this the other day it made me think of how the Republicans and neo-con always respond to any event: "Nobody could have foretold this [terrorist attack, storm, levee failure, insurgency, economic collapse, pollution . . . fill in the blank]" The Bush/Reagan legacy is: stupidity, ignorance, greed, fear and waste. Oh, and stubbornness.

anticipate better days ahead.