:The Economy! The Economy!
This is the cry of a nation unified at last on one point, if on absolutely
nothing else. At the moment, nobody cares two cents about social issues (except
to get rid of those damned illegal immigrants who are taking all the jobs and
money), about the environment or foreign policy, we want someone to pat our
hands and soothe our fears about THE MONEY! Loudest among the cries and most
discussed and pitied is the beloved baby of the family, “The Middle Class.”
First of all, before I
launch my offensive thesis, let me establish some credentials. My husband, son
and I live on about $40,000 a year, in Brooklyn, where the rent for our 400
square foot apartment is $1600 a month, and that’s a pretty good deal here. We
have thousands of dollars in student loan debt, and are part of the lost
generation of college grads, who will probably never have high paying jobs in
our field of study. I am currently looking for work and having a hard time at
it. The longer I go on unemployed the lower we see our savings account drain. My
son is due to have costly surgery that will require some fuzzy math to work in
to the family budget. Beyond my immediate family, my dad is in his fifties and
has been searching for work desperately for almost a year now. He and my mom
are behind on their mortgage payments. They, like so many others in their
situation, have never been behind on a payment in their lives. My uncle
likewise is out of work. My father-in-law was out of work for a while. My Aunt
will be kicked out of her home any day. I’m there. I’m in it. I get it. We are
truly in the throes of a nasty recession. That’s not up for debate, but I would
like to make the contentious, distasteful claim that the real problem, at least
for the middle class, is not a money problem. The real problem is that we want
too much.
My mother-in-law told me
recently about a family she met many years ago. Her family was new in town and
didn’t have anywhere to go for Thanksgiving, so this family invited them over.
The family consisted of a mom, a dad, and six children. My mother in-law told
me about discovering something curious at the family’s house on Thanksgiving.
She had gone to pop her head in on the children, who were playing in a bedroom
(which the four girls shared), and immediately noticed a marked absence of
clutter. There were two sets of bunk beds with simple linens, and a couple
dressers, but little else. She peeked in the closet and saw that each girl had
one pair of shoes, one jacket, and a warm blanket folded on the shelf above.
They didn’t have a black coat and a brown one, a light one and a heavy one, a
snow one and a wind one and a rain one. They had one coat that would,
admittedly, probably manage for any of those situations. They didn’t have every
kind of shoe they might need for all shade of casual or dress attire, just one
basic pair of shoes to keep their feet off the ground. Each kid seemed to have
a toy each as they were playing in the center of the room, but there were no
shelves jammed with books and toys, no overflowing containers of crayons and
markers and paints and bubble blowers, Nerf
guns, or piles of half assembled Lego
structures, Bop Its or Jenga logs, My Little Ponies, or hammocks heavy with stuffed animals. They had
no “stuff.” Rejoining the parents in the kitchen, she realized it wasn’t just
the children who’d been deprived. The family seemed to have just the things
they needed and not one thing more. No one had to sit on a milk crate at dinner
or eat with their hands, but the whole house still felt sparse. She asked the
mother about this later, and the mother just said that they had what they
needed and they didn’t need anymore. They were going for the proverbial lilies
of the field approach to life.
In America this is
bizarre, some would even think it unhealthy, damaging to the phyche or
creativity of those poor kids, a hair away from neglect. For the most part, we
Americans don’t hope to have our needs
met, our “daily bread” as it used to be called, we feel entitled to have our wants met. We are great worshipers of variety, easily bored, easily
disenthralled with acquisitions. We delight in opening our closet in the
morning and seeing a bounty of options for how to fashion ourselves today, or
opening our cupboard and seeing a bounty of options of delicious things to eat
today. How often do we clothes shop or grocery shop, bemoaning how “there is
NOTHING to eat in the house!” or we have “NOTHING to wear!” when of course,
technically there is food in the pantry, but it’s those potatoes and canned
vegetables and bags of rice that have been in there forever because you haven’t
had the energy to do anything with them. What we mean is there is nothing yummy to eat. And of course, there are
garments in the closet as well, pieces of fabric that would aptly hide your
body from the eyes of strangers and protect you from a draft, but there are no fun clothes, there are no new clothes, there are no clothes of a
particular pattern, cut or shade. And that feels like deprivation.
Now lest you misread me
as self-righteous and judge-y, let me say that this is all coming from
self-examination. I am judging, but I’m starting with myself. This lust for the
unessential and for variety manifests itself in all kinds of ridiculous ways in
my own life, from my excess of shoes, to the three types of shampoo in my
shower and two types of conditioner, not counting leave-in conditioning sprays,
of which I have two. My two-year-old son has no less than four pairs of crocs,
all in different colors. My bookshelves hold as many books that I haven’t read
as those I have because secretly I want my own, in-home, bookstore. I have an
unconfessed desire for a constantly stocked collection of wine; I pretty openly
aspire to an impressive array of tea flavors, and I have an admitted fondness
for cute coffee mugs, which is why I have a whole cupboard shelf of them. I
could keep going.
Sometimes I have the
acute sensation that my home is a black hole gently, quietly sucking things into it. This is the consumer economy we speak of with pride,
a country dotted with black holes gently, quietly sucking things into them, “driving the engine” of the economy. This is why
the middle class is getting so much attention in this crisis because our
economy is buoyed up by the force of this sucking. These hundreds of thousands
of black holes sucking are just like hundreds of thousands of little cogs and
wheels turning and making this thing run. Our insatiability keeps the lights on
in this country. That is why we must be put back to work, so that we can get
back in our over-sized vehicles and drive to Target and Walmart, T.J Maxx and
Best Buy, like the dutiful, avaricious consumers we’ve always so dependably
been and buy things that will add that old spice to our lives, Variety.
This is what makes me
uncomfortable about our economy; it is dependant on vice. Or if that is too
strongly stated, let me rephrase it. Certain virtues are destructive to the
vitality of our economy, virtues such as contentment, thrift, frugality,
resourcefulness, and quality workmanship. We have been blasted to bits by our
lack of financial prudence, by our over-reaching, by our lust, and it seems
that the way forward that is being proposed is to return to those same foolish
habits as quickly as possible. Consumer confidence is rated and reported daily,
as though our greed were some idiot turtle that must again be coaxed out of its
shell. We must not learn any lessons, we must not reign in our appetites, we
must not scale back, do without, repair, reuse, pay cash, eat in, grow our own
food, or play cards around the kitchen table. Those things are dangerous to our
economy. The nightmarish premise for the next apocalyptic film could easily be,
The Day Every American Became Content With What They Already Had; systems would
come crashing down, lower Manhattan would be reduced to rubble. Maybe the
system needs to come crashing down because a system threatened by virtue is
inherently unsound.
I came across an
incredibly apropos quote the other day. Henry James in The Varieties of
Religious Experience writes:
“Poverty…may…be…the spiritual
reform which our time stands most in need of.
Among us English-Speaking
people especially do the praises of poverty need once more to be boldly sung.
We have grown literally afraid to be poor…We have lost the power even of
imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant: the
liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul…the paying our way by
what we are or do and not by what we have…
I recommend this matter
to your serious pondering, for it is certain that the prevalent fear of poverty
among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our
civilization suffers.”
We have come so far from
where James stood that we’ve probably never even heard of any “ancient
idealization of poverty,” and when he says that we have “grown literally afraid
to be poor,” most would probably knit their brows and think “…and that’s bad??”
Fear of poverty seems to us middle class Americans as basic and unquestionable
as the fear of death. But as everyone knows, the old recipe for overcoming a
fear is facing it. Our grandparents and great grandparents faced poverty,
looked it square in the face, and in the voices of the ones I’ve talked to I
hear this undertone of pride. They’re proud of what it made them, proud of the
industriousness and self-sacrifice it called out of them, proud that they know
the worth of five left over green beans that would have to sprout wings and fly
away before they were ever thrown in the trash can, proud of something as silly
as knowing how many squares of toilet paper were actually necessary to get the
job done without wasting a one, proud that they turn off the shower to lather
and then turn it back on to rinse. They do peculiar things like collect the
postage paid envelopes that companies send to people in the mail or hold onto
appliances forever meaning to fix them, when we would just dump them and buy a
new one. They do these things because they know the true value of things.
Everything is cheap and disposable to us, so we look around and don’t see the mammon
piling up around us.
I was in Egypt for a
while just out of college. I remember the first morning, waking up and looking
out of the window of my hostel at the crammed crazy city of Cairo, and noticing
on every rooftop, people sleeping on mats or families rising in the early cool
hours and gathering around some burner for breakfast. The floor of their home
was the roof of the building, the walls of their home were the draped
clothes-lines around them and their roof was the sky. It rocked my world. It completely recalibrated my sense of
what was necessary for life. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying anyone with an
actual four walls and a roof over their head is bourgeois swine, I’m just
asking what would happen if we reset our standard of living? What if losing a
ranch house and being forced to move into an apartment wasn’t experienced as a
kind of Jobian catastrophe, but was just ok? Maybe the practice is still too
much for us spoiled children to muster, but what if we at least reestablished
the virtue of asking only for “our
daily bread,” of desiring only what we need and no more.
My mom told me about a
guy who comes to the shelter where she serves breakfast on Saturday mornings.
He told her that everyday he wakes up and thanks God he has a roof over his
head. This is humorous because he lives in his car. He means it to be funny but
he’s also dead serious. My mom was chastened by that, so now she wakes up each
morning in a house that she may lose and thanks God that she gets to spend one
more day in it.
Some might hear me and
think, well she just hates wealth! Why’s
everyone got to be hatin’ on wealth. My like or dislike of wealth isn’t the
point, my point is that if your happiness is in things your happiness is
extremely fragile because the unavoidable fact is that things are subject to
destruction and decay and theft and the stock market. It could all be gone
tomorrow. My aim isn’t to make people feel guilty for what they have, my point
is that our society is in a bind for sure, and right now we have choices as to
how to forge ahead. The choice I see us making is to do whatever it takes to
get the money back, get the stuff back, reopen the playground gates and let our
greed play again. I see us not learning a damn thing. I’m saying what if
instead of trying to get things back to the fragile, unsustainable way they
were, we tried changing ourselves instead? What if we tried learning from our
mistakes, redistributing our values, and becoming more grateful people, who
humbly ask just for what we need, and rejoice with gratitude if and when our
cup spilleth over? What if we forced our economy to adapt to fit people of
virtue and character rather than require immaturity and avarice? The great
irony is that all the wanting and spending and getting is all about feeling
good, but it doesn’t feel good, not ultimately. It’s just sand in a sieve, but
being content with what you have, even if it’s very little, that actually feels good. Eh, it’s a pipe
dream, I’m sure, but I had to say it.
