Disposable Diapers and Other Disposable Things

Going Off Half Cooked (Originally Written in April 2008)

Disposable Diapers and Other Disposable Things

As a parent of four children it has become my unwavering opinion that one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century is the disposable diaper. I quake and tremble at the thought of past generations of parents having to deal with some of the dootie explosions that my kids blessed us with. The thought of taking a cloth diaper and trying to resurrect it for use later is about as appealing as eating worms.

The disposable diaper was a huge hit shortly after its invention, especially with men who were now being expected to take on more and more of the duties that had been formerly relegated to women. As a man, I will readily admit that dootie duty was not on my list of priorities of things that had to be done as part of the new expectations for my species.

But early Disposable Diaper man, like Cro-Magnon man discovering fire, knew a good thing when he saw it and began to think. Now thinking back in the 20th century was not nearly as difficult as it is today. There were no cell phones, computers, Chia Pets, or 24 hour cable news channels to distract us. So 20th century man was thinking one day and must have thought, “If a diaper can be disposable, what else can we make that is also disposable?”

And thus, society came crumbling to the ground due to the invention of the disposable diaper. Cheap transistor radios were shortly followed by cheap televisions, computers, VCRs, DVD players, cell phones, microwaves, whoopee cushions, and other gadgets that all became disposable.

I remember as a kid walking into the local T.V. repair store. It was called Lee’s T.V. for some odd reason. I never met anyone there named Lee. It was a cool place with rows of televisions and VCRs the size of a Buick. The VCRs constantly flashed 12:00 and made a ker-chunk noise when they tape ejector popped up. The electrical scent of ozone permeated everything and mingled with the plastic scent of new electronics. They even started to rent VHS movies which was getting big back in the 80s..

Lee’s slowly evolved into a video rental store over the years with some electronics being sold in a corner. The repair business all but dried up with the explosion of cheap disposable electronics. Then the huge mega video rental stores came to town and Lee’s faded closed up shop. Today it is something called a Muebleria and the folks sell furniture there. I’ve never actually gone in, just looked through the window as I’ve walked by.

T.V. repair used to be an honorable trade. When your T.V. or VCR broke you took it to the repair guy and a few days later you picked it up as good as new. The repairman has gone the way of the buggy whip maker which is sad in some ways. I still have a repair man who can come to my house to fix the oven, stove, or refrigerator but he’s getting older and is the last of his kind.

The local Sears has an appliance repair center and sends people out to do repairs but it isn’t the same. They rarely have any parts to complete repairs and have to send items to a mega repair center to get fixed nearly every time. The repair center mainly exists for those folks who purchased a service contract. Most of the time they determine your VCR is a lost cause and give you a new one. It’s cheaper to give you a new one than pay a guy to fix it under the service contract. If you want to pay you can be prepared to pony up more than a new one so you don’t even bother anymore. Just one more disposable piece of society.

We had an old refrigerator from the 1960s. It was originally made by International Harvester, a company that went away in the 80s. It weighed a ton and had a tiny little icebox that would eventually frost over requiring the thing to be defrosted. It ran year after year after year. We finally got rid of it about two years ago. There was nothing wrong with it. We donated it along with an International Harvester window A/C unit from the same time period to a museum. It was sad to see them go but they both used enough electricity to power a small city in comparison to modern appliances.

Those old appliances were built to last nearly a lifetime. I miss them because they could be relied on to function day in and day out. They are gone now, replaced by disposable, modern models made by companies that I’m sure I don’t pronounce correctly made by folks in a far away country who are grateful to be working long hours for pennies a day.

The disposable society has left my kids with a warped view of the things we own. It bothers me when something doesn’t work right or hiccups a little they immediately declare that it is time to buy a new one and throw the old one away. They stare at me funny when I start fiddling with the offending item, not understanding the concept of trying to make something work just a little longer. An extra week, month, or longer of getting a machine to limp along seems like a waste of time to them. Why repair when you can start over new with a swipe of the debit card.

Our society has done the same thing with automobiles. I used to feel pretty smug opening up my car’s hood and replacing the air filter or changing the hoses for the radiator. Now I cannot even find the engine among the miles of conduit for the electronics to communicate. It used to be that you kept a car for half a lifetime, now I know people who have owned more cars in a couple years than folks used to own in an entire lifetime.

The change has been especially difficult on my father in law. He is an old school car guy. He fixed every car he ever owned. He even helped me pull the transmission on the old dodge pickup my wife drove while I was in college. I still remember the day his spirit finally broke. He had picked up one of the more current mini vans at a good used price a year or so earlier. The first cut was when he had to remove the tire to change the alternator. And that was just the beginning of the slow death of his long time love of cars.

Somehow, removing a front tire to change an alternator just doesn’t seem right. The problems continued after that. His hair got thinner and the lines by his eyes deeper as he spent hours trying to fix one problem after another on the disposable mini van. It was never meant to be fixed, just thrown away, but my father in law just couldn’t accept it.

One day he took it to the shop of a friend. He was old school like my father in law and had made his living fixing cars in a modest shop on busy street in town. He was the epitome of the old school small business guy. As the years went by this man had seen his business mostly shift over to older vehicles. He took a look at the disposable mini van and declared it dead on arrival. My father in law almost wept. He was finally beaten. The man tried to consol my father in law and eventually traded him lunch for the old mini van. We never saw that mini van again.

The days of classic cars must surely be gone when the old hands can’t fix them anymore. The romance is gone when a kid in high school can’t take a car and get it running anymore. All disposable, all gone. The old mustangs from the 60s still prowl the roads but I’m hard pressed to find one from the early 90s.

The disposable outlook on life has gone too far in many cases. Marriages today are often looked at as being disposable. I have actually heard people refer to some marriages as “starter” marriages now, with even the married couple assuming that like a starter house, they will eventually move on to something better.

Folks even treat children today like they are disposable. Often the family dog gets treated better than the children. In our state, if you hit a kid, you will probably be encouraged to get a counseling session or two. Folks understand that you were too stressed out by your job. It wasn’t your fault. But hit your dog and you will spend time in jail, the dog will be taken away, and you will be vilified in the paper with scathing letters to the editor from concerned dog lovers.

People treat their children like clothing accessories. Take the case of so many busy single moms I see these days. They are unconcerned or too busy to be bothered by the fact that their children have no father in the picture or that the kids are being traumatized by the steady stream of new boyfriends coming in and out of mom’s life or the extra half siblings added on a regular basis to the tiny apartment they live in. Teachers wait in vain at teacher conferences for these parents to find out about their child’s performance in school. They hope that just once, the parent will come in and show some real interest in their own child.

As the whole mess spins out of control the disposable kids are dumped on grandparents who seem not to understand why their children’s lives are such a mess. Their grandchildren become their own children by default as mom and the new boyfriend are too busy for them now.

I worry about my children. I don’t want them growing up with this warped sense of life where everything is disposable. Medical supplies and diapers should be disposable not children, cars, marriages, or electronics. The disposable society helps perpetuate the drive to have the newest and greatest gadgets which drives rampant credit card abuse. When things cease to have long term value, where will our children place their values? How can they look forward to the future when everything has to be new right now?

Maybe I’m going off a little half cooked here but perhaps it is time that we start living as if life was not so disposable.