My new Okabashis are not quite broken in yet, and I got a blister at the base of my big toe, right at the big knuckle where it joins my foot. I rummaged around in my medicine cabinet and located the bandage box, with its collection of assorted adhesive sizes and styles. I selected a small round one, just big enough to cover the boo-boo.

Band-aids are wonderful things, useful and inexpensive, and remarkably effective at doing their job. They are truly a wonder of our age–I find little, practical things like this the major benefit of civilization, not the flashier, more complex fruits of our technology, like cell phones or Ipods. Not that the band-aid isn’t a highly technological artifact. No electricity or wires or transistors, no moving parts, but nonetheless a mass produced item of wonderful, perhaps even life-saving properties. But you are familiar with band-aids, I’m sure.

This time I focus not on the bandage itself, but its packaging. It is encased in a tiny paper envelope that easily rips open and peels away, revealing the bandage inside, ready to deploy, and folded in such a way that it can be placed easily in the most inaccessible spot without having to touch it with your germ-covered fingers. As you peel off the wrapper, the bandage is inside, with the parts destined to cover the wound safely protected and sterile. The whole package is made in such a way that as you open it, the bandage inside opens up like a blossom, ready to be applied to the injury, with tabs and edges placed for easy manipulation and placement.

But its not just the bandage and its clever packaging that gets my attention. These things are mass-produced, by the millions, and no doubt the paper, adhesive, matting, latex and other parts, as well as the paper envelope and its creases and tear lines are assembled by clever machines which fold and snip these little buggers and wrap them up, encasing each one in exactly the same way, so they all work exactly right the first time, every time. No doubt these machines are very large and complex and expensive, and are fed by vast hoppers of paper (printed with instructions), glue, plastic, and all the other components of this little product. Some engineer, or team of engineers, designed this machine, wrote specifications for its use, developed it, tested it, wrote the training manuals for those who operate and maintain it, debugged the software that no doubt is a key feature of its operation–and so on. It goes on forever.

In the vast bureaucracy that brings us this product, there are countless minds and hands of great expertise and skill which work together to bring us this simple, yet wonderful little appliance. And not only technical skills are involved, but administrative and organizational knowledge, managers and executives, accountants, marketers, salesmen, janitors and truck drivers, factory electricians and cafeteria workers, the whole constellation of human labor and creative genius that brings us a bandage for less than a penny; a great pyramid of labor and genius to cover my little blister.

We all participate in creating this thing, and many others like it. But every day there are fewer of us. More and more of these minds and hands are now in China, or other distant places. And every day there are fewer of us involved in making the things we use. The mechanical engineer who spent months designing the tiny cams and followers and rockers that folded and creased the sterile little paper package that encased my bandage probably isn’t an American any more.

We don’t make things any more. Its not cost-effective. Oh sure, some of us still do, because we haven’t found a way to have it done cheaper by someone else yet. And until we do, those of us who still make things will be well-paid, and prosperous–until its our turn to be replaced, too. And those of us who design and plan and administer and organize will eventually be replaced–not all of us, of course, but a few more of us every day.

But at least, my Okabashis are made in Buford, Georgia.