I once had a conversation with a woman name Lucy. She worked on a textile machine winding warps that would be woven into cloth.

She told me about the life of a piece of cloth in her childhood home. Mother would buy some yardage and make a dress. Outgrown, it would then be patched, mended and handed down to any child at hand who needed it. When no child could be coerced to wear it, it would be made into a patchwork quilt. Exhausted as a quilt, it was cut for dishtowels and wipe up rags. When the disintegration became too great to find service at the kitchen sink, it would be woven into a rug. When the old rugs lost their identity, they were finally sold to a ragpicker, and in the case of woolen rags, picked apart in a shoddy mill and remanufactured into blankets.

Go into a Wal-Mart. Look around at the synthetic products. Now look at our waste stream and look at what is thrown away from the average home. See any similarities?

If we want to have free enterprise and an entrepreneurial-based economy, aren’t we better off with the Lucy model than Wal-Mart? Where are the promised opportunities for everyday Americans in the aisles of Wal-Mart?

It seems to me we are trading self-sufficiency, conservation of resources and entrepreneurship for a kind of low-wage slavery, the greatest benefit of which ends up as trash and pollution.

Peter McFarland, Coopers Mills