We don’t want the former, and wish to collect the latter.
In our age of mass production, supplysiders push consumption to the point of writing up bad loans, hence Repo.
Then, and this happened to me once, products came out of the assembly line all look alike: I once mistakenly opened an identical rental car (Taurus) and it even started until I found out my laptop wasn’t in the back seat. Now, we want Retro because of its obvious scarcity.
On weekend, we see different lifestyles at play: Harley fans, sport cyclists, families on outing, baseball league and of course, retro car owners, parking their souped-up automobiles in Main Street Old Town. Onlookers must have felt a mix of envy and admiration. Nothing feels better than a waxed-up oldie.
In contrast, miles and miles of repo cars are found next to “salvaged” cars in our industrial wasteland. Repo men branded them with chalk. Same steel. But the retros are well-kept while the repos are sold for parts.
What a difference in attitude and emotional investment.
This unchecked attitude can get carried over to how we treat people.
When we love someone or think positively about that person, we treat them (even if they are old or have passed their useful phase) as “retro”. In contrast, when we found no utility value out of them, they are essentially, in our eyes, repos.
Their values are now up to the bean counters to decide. Fair market value for repo and increased value over time for retro.
We need to retrain and keep that child-like innocence, to look at life anew. To see people’s value and worth. In the age of mass production, we push consumption and adoption (I-phone 5 and new markets like China). But have we developed the ability to tell the difference between people and product? (to make things worse, career coaches often recommend us to “package” ourselves and “reinvent” ourselves, just as they had once failed with the New Coke. Or that discarding habit has spilled over to the inner sanctum of our hearts? The way McNamara used to crunch the numbers during the Vietnam War (ROI means how many casualties on each side etc..).
I will never forget the characters in “Never Let Me Go” by Ishiguro. They were “created” to serve as industrial organ donors (Repo) to preserve Retro (rich people who can afford surgery to replace their failed organs). While waiting to “donate” their body parts, the main character, Ruth, asked “Why did you collect our art works then”. “Just to see you got soul at all” replied the Principal. There is a line to be crossed over from Retro to Repo. Then the issue looms larger than just a misspell. It’s a cancer growing undetected in our post-industrial society on steroid.
Thang Nguyen 555 