For some, the era of conspicuous consumption is over....
Walt Breitinger has a list. He keeps it in his pocket, each item marked with a highlighter. He is proud of his list. In fact, he likes to brag about its contents because not one of the items is in his home and never will be. He has no air conditioner, no VCR, no electric razor or dishwasher. No snow blower or leaf blower hangs in his garage. It's not the money, or an unwillingness to spend it, that has banned these gadgets from his house. It's not a fear of sharp edges or moving parts.
The Breitingers are thoroughly modern, well-educated people, but the fact of the matter is, they would like to have less, or at the very least, they would like to use less.
With that goal in mind, Walt has pledged that within the year, he will travel round-trip from his home in Valparaiso to work in Merrillville without using gas. Within the year, he and his family have vowed, they will shut off their electricity for a week, maybe a month, just to see if they can do it, just to remind themselves of how much they use.
The ultimate goal, he said, would be to live without cars, refrigerators, indoor plumbing and other "mechanized stuff". But he's a practical man who recognizes a theoretical goal when he sees one. Such men know the value of stepping stones, so he has a list.
Bob Reinhardt's accounting is less exact. He can't tell you what he doesn't have because it requires thinking of things he doesn't want or need, or doesn't have to buy. He occasionally things about what he would grab if there was a fire in his apartment: a few key text books, a Buddhist prayer drum, a flute, some blank stationery, a few pens and a change of underwear. The most visible way to measure Reinhardt's efforts to consume less is to look at the back of his pants. Every pair of shorts and every pair of slacks, except the pair reserved for suits have sludge stripes: stains from the mud and dirt kicked up by his bicycle tires. He rides everywhere, reluctantly taking his car to distant hospitals for his clinical training. He is a third-year nursing student at Valparaiso University and lives in town. Admittedly, his consumption is limited by his current financial status, a situation that encourages frugality. But while this will change in time, his consumption levels will not.
Both Reinhardt and the Breitingers are trying to live simpler, less cluttered lives - lives where their needs are products of necessity and not products of Madison Avenue. It's not as difficult as it sounds, or as unpopular as it seems. Henry David Thoreau wrote a book about it and while it wasn't a best seller at the time, its tenets have since become the model for those who wish to live lives unencumbered by the glitz and packaging Americans have come to believe is necessary. As the country enters the 1990s faced with mounting financial, environmental and social burdens, people are beginning to turn their backs on the materialism that consumed much of the '80s. Call it conspicuous conservation, or paring back or acquiring a world view, but by whatever name and for whatever reason, America is learning to make do: the "me" generation has developed a conscience.
"It has nothing to do with depriving myself of anything or giving up happiness," said Breitinger, speaking of his ultimate goal. "I don't see it as requiring sacrifices. It's just going to require freeing up and weaning ourselves from all this conditioning we have here".
He refers to the commercials and ads that promise consumers they'll be smarter, more sophisticated, happier people if they buy a new car, a bigger television, a more powerful stereo.
"Intellectually I don't believe it, but I've been conditioned to believe it and it's very, very hard to break it and I feel like I'm hooked on heroine and I'm never going to get off and I know I'll lead a better life and be happier if I can kick it," he said.
It's a hard task, he has pent the better part of 20 years working at it with varying degrees of success. In the late '60s he bought a foreign car with a small engine in an effort to conserve gas. Some looked at the 1200 cc engine and said "my motorcycle has a bigger engine than that". It probably ran better, too. "It was a disaster. It was a foreign car and I couldn't get parts for it and it cost me 10 times more to maintain and I gave up and went to an American car," he said.
His wife, Cindy, managed to get along nicely without a car for years, walking to won or riding a bike to the hospital where she works, now part time, as a cardiac nurse. "I don't like cars. I have never like cars, they give me no pleasure, not to drive, or to look at," she said. "I guess I sometimes considered them a necessary evil and thought of being able to exist without one is very pleasant."
To that end, the Breitingers now own an electric car, a recumbent bicycle and a hand-powered vehicle. Between them, Walt intends to make the daily trip to Merrillville where he works as a commodities broker. At the moment he can make it halfway.
Reinhardt, too, believes in alternative modes of travel. He laughs when he rides by the gas pump on the way to class or to the Laundromat. "I get where I'm going faster and with less aggravation," he said, and does it often enough to go by the moniker "Biker Bob". Reinhardt grew up the son of a minister and he and his siblings learned early on "we wouldn't go without by going with less". Going with less has life that much easier for Reinhardt. He has found that when he chose to have less, his focus changed. The decision is about more than just saving money or conserving gas. It is about more than fending off commercials and the addictive properties of Nintendo or air conditioners. It is about more than just the noise of electric hedge clippers and powered lawn mowers.
It's about virtues.... The virtues of sitting on the porch in the summer instead of sitting in a room looking at a box. The virtues of playing an instrument instead of playing a stereo. This is about the virtues of reaching out instead of holding back.
"The less I carry the more I can do for others," said Reinhardt.
That means learning how to make toys and always carrying an extra to give away, as is his practice. It means recognizing the importance relationships, communicating, the written word and thus always carrying something to write on even if it means pulling the stationary from a room full of fire. "I like to believe that the person I respect the most doesn't have the biggest house, the biggest car, the most clothes, the most appliances," Breitinger said, "but who knows how to play the most instruments, knows the classics, knows poetry, knows how to speak many foreign languages, knows how to wear his clothes for years instead of weeks and knows how to conserve rather than spend. To me that's the person I would admire."
It is becoming harder to be that kind of person. It requires time and discipline - time to enjoy those pursuits, discipline to make the time. You have to be willing to turn off the television, to pick up a flute, to pull out a cookbook instead of pull open a frozen dinner.
Even those who recognize the virtues fall short of the goal: the Breitingers have a television set. "I feel like a sinner," Walt Breitinger said. "We went through an evaluation period this summer when we kept records for a week to see who was using the television just to get a feel of whether our use rate was out of line," Cindy Breitinger said. "We keep it locked on Channel 11 and we have hours restricted and we try to edit out violence and ads," Breitinger said. "In a way the ads strengthen you because if you're able to watch all these without being conditioned....in a way it helps build stamina. But for the most part we feel it's a terrible weakness and a terrible influence on society and the family and for the most part it's promoting environmental destruction."
And Reinhardt. "I myself have been known to enjoy a funky little black and white (television set). I'll never give up Bugs Bunny. I allow myself an hour for cartoons on Saturday morning. I'm not perfect. I have my flaws. I use Mom's microwave, I watch TV, I don't take these home," he said holding up a restaurant cream contain, "and separate the foil and the plastic for recycling. I don't compost my food times and I do own a car...," but he also has sludge stripes and the satisfaction of knowing that pleasure comes in simple ways from simple changes or decisions.
That is how it should be, said Ken Dunn, director of the Resource Center in Chicago, an educational center for recycling, whose family members also have made efforts to simplify their lives. Living simply doesn't mean living to extremes, or even going without. It means making choices you can live with. "We have many of the things that others have, we just use them differently," he said. "It's not an absolute. We're going to consume less, but by diminishing and altering our use."
Reproduced
with many thanks from the 
.
[ Top of Page ]
