Good Riddance

My friend Susan flew in from Vancouver to help another friend Nina throw out all of the stuff she has collected over the years to make room for a less cluttered life. Susan, trained as a teacher, has avoided the classroom for many years. She started a business--Good Riddance--in which she helps people discard and organize after living too many years in a consumer society. "Making room for living well." That's her slogan.

Susan is exploiting the worst of our buying sprees. She and her partner Heather offer courses in how to make money from your own junk, and poignantly, how to move your mother and father into assisted living without breaking their hearts, and yours when you throw out their stuff. Having emptied my parents' home after my father died five years ago, I understand what happens when you ship too much of their stuff into my home so that now I have multi-generational stuff cluttering my home. I even have an object in the Good Riddance Virtual Clutter Museum.

There is even Cluttermania, the Musical Revue, which is how Susan hopes to make her money, performing now before assisted living audiences, corporate functions, and women's groups. Someday, Cluttermania might be on Broadway, well, at least off-off Broadway, or Las Vegas, if it ever revives.

Susan has this business because we are not a sustainable society and it doesn't look like we have the determination to get there despite the dire warnings of global warming. President Obama, in an interview published this weekend in the New York Times magazine, is speaking about radical change. After the Recession doesn't mean a return to normal.

"It is true that as tough an economic time as it is right now, we haven’t had 42 months of 20, 30 percent unemployment. And so the degree of desperation and the shock to the system may not be as great. And that means that there’s going to be more resistance to any of these steps: reforming the financial system or reforming our health care system or doing something about energy. On each of these things — you know, things aren’t so bad in the eyes of a lot of Americans that they say, We’re willing to completely try something new. But part of my job I think is to bridge that gap between the status quo and what we know we have to do for our future."

Read the entire interview and how Obama wants to unclutter our lives of the wasteful, and reorganize our economy.

Now back to Susan: I drove her back to North Shore Towers, a very large apartment complex where many octogenarians live. When we drove up to the security gate, the guard waved us in without issuing a parking permit or calling up to her mother's apartment to verify our identity at 11:00 on a Sunday night. The guard looked into the car and saw Susan, still slim, still attractive at sixty. "Just dropping off," and he waved us in. Susan was in shock, and I couldn't stop laughing.

Post script: We might not be able to afford more clutter, but these guys certainly can. Look through the highest paid CEOs for 2008, and notice how white and male they are!