Instead of Consumerism, Let's Try Consumer Sharing

Jim Hightower on Nov 5, 2025

How about some good news for a change? News that has nothing to do with Donald Whatzizname. News you might even use.

It's about "The Library of Things," a real library, but different. Just as our public libraries share a wealth of publications -- this one in Brunswick, Maine, also maintains a wealth of tools, devices, equipment and other "things" for people to check out, use and return.

Hazel Onsrud, a creative, can-do spirit on the staff of Brunswick's Curtis Memorial Library, initiated this commonwealth of some 1,500 products that locals can borrow for free. The New York Times reports that residents are flocking to this pragmatic, beneficial resource for the common good. And why wouldn't they? After all, not everyone can afford a $350 KitchenAid mixer of their own and a roto-tiller you might use once a year could be shared by many. Also, a bullhorn, a grain mill, a ukulele, an embossing machine -- seriously, we should borrow, rather than thinking each of us must buy and store these things ... or do without.

This concept reduces each family's expenses, waste and accumulation of "stuff," while advancing cooperation and community. And the public library infrastructure is already in place to make it available.

This idea is not new, nor is it unique to Brunswick. In fact, America's progressive populist movement of the 1870s built an entire economic alternative to corporate monopoly around this very concept. And today, some 2,000 "libraries-of-things" are already functioning worldwide, giving ordinary people a grassroots way to avoid profiteering, corporate consumerism.

Hazel Onsrud has issued a challenge to us: "If a few of us can do this in Maine," she says, "anyone can." And you and I are the anyones to do it.

A BIBLICAL-LEVEL WARNING FROM A HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT

An essential part of our children's education is learning proper moral behavior. And who better to deliver that ethical guidance than politicians?

Huh? Bizarre, yet this is the conclusion of the GOP's theocratic Christian Nationalist faction. They are demanding that legislatures across the country must intervene in local educational policy to require that all public schools plaster every classroom with Christianity's Ten Commandments. It's in-your-face religiosity, forcing one religious dogma on students of every faith. It's also ludicrously hypocritical -- after all, legislators are notorious for committing adultery, stealing from the poor, killing in the name of the state, bearing false witness against immigrants, bowing down to false gods ... and otherwise mocking the Christian religion's own commandments. Who do these nationalists and their politicians think they're fooling?

Certainly not America's free-thinking students. If you wonder whether young people will just go along, take heart in the uplifting thoughts of Arjun Sharda, a high-school freshman in Round Rock, Texas. In a recent op-ed piece, he went right at the humbuggery of the state's Republican leaders: "The same lawmakers who preach about freedom and limited government," he wrote, "are now legislating what we must hang on our classroom walls ... But faith loses its power when it's forced. True belief comes from conviction, not compulsion ... Texas prides itself in independence, yet this law enforces conformity."

The Christian Nationalist autocrats are not only trying to turn public classrooms into their exclusive pulpits, but to establish their repressive theology as America's official religion. As Sharda warns, "Texas should stop confusing religion with righteousness -- before the wall between church and state becomes just another thing we've torn down."

To find out more about Jim Hightower and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

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