Circuit City Soapbox

I feel one shade bad about the closing of Circuit City, not because I have huge insight into its upper management. It's just that I remember when it first opened in Baltimore. The company had one of the early digital animation commercials with a plug plugging itself into a store. They were pretty groovy for their time, and you could get a kick-ass car stereo installed for a reasonable price.

Fast forward to 2008 in Austin, where my betrothed says there's a Circuit City and a Best Buy directly across the street from each other. Battle of the Discount Titans. It's the quintessential sign of the times, right in our faces. We can't even buy all the stuff they're making overseas even though the industry of Must Have pitched their products at a ferocious rate. Now that chain stores are liquidating a sixpack at a time, all those bio-diverse wetlands that were drained to build shopping malls probably look more attractive in retrospect, than a mall with half its tenants gone.

But I didn't want to get into a preach-a-thon. Just remember that scene in Twister at the drive-in, where Helen Hunt says a tornado's coming to which Bill Paxton replies, "It's already here." In the unstoppable pursuit of more stuff (partly to placate people we're too busy to spend time with because we're too busy working to pay for things we can't afford anyway), we've forced ourselves into a financial cataclysm we'll spend years climbing out of, stepping over the unopened packages of Grand Theft Auto and similar A.I. products that kept us in front of a TV screen instead of out in the world paying attention.

So I'm looking at this period in our evolution as one of those opportunistic growing pains. The kind where we tighten our belts and stop whining about the way things were in the last century, when the industry of buying and selling invisible money still thrived. Now we get to look at what's really important, and act on it as a group. Because there are way more important things to be doing in the creation of a sustainable future with sustainable people living in it – with a super-sized surplus of new, sustainable jobs. And hey, a little organic gardening in your own backyard will help to burn off a few of those extra calories.