the fashion of the world is to avoid cost, and you encounter it

I used to hang this poster in my college dorm.

Next to the movie poster of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. What can I say? I was… not your run of the mill 19 year-old. I was still shirking off the yoke of my Catholicism and really… hated money. I understood that it turned a marriage from love to tolerance. I wasn’t impressed with the shallow veneer of my peers obsessed with J Crew and beer. But I didn’t have to pay my own bills and hadn’t yet discovered coffee in white mermaid cups or kitchen gadgetry or… the thrill of a new pair of jeans. 

I think I still have that poster… somewhere. In a closet, rolled up and torn, probably unfit to grace any walls. But I’ve been thinking about the image that faced me every morning I opened my eyes in that humid wood paneled room on Oxford Street. 

There is a belief that liberalism is the indulgence of a youthful, irresponsible mind. That to be financially conservative is the wisdom of spending more time on this earth. And… to some degree, I have to agree with that. Or at least respect it. That as one gets older, one learns how to pay bills. And, hopefully, one accepts the responsibility of only buying what one can afford to pay. Makes sense. In fact, I try to live my own life by that attitude.

Last week the news told us that the poverty level had risen to 1 out of 7 Americans. That’s huge. Although, not huge enough, apparently, to stay as close to the forefront of our brains as Lindsay Lohan. Or to propel anyone to do anything. There’s a lot of complaining about what the government isn’t doing. What the president fails to do. But nothing about our own responsibility, to our own bank accounts… or to the people who just had the rotten luck to be amongst the ones out of seven.

They say this is the worst economic situation since the 30’s and 40’s. Sure the data says that… but does any of us who spew that thought… do we really get it? Do we understand what poverty is? Do we understand how it got that way? Do we understand what it means to be poor? And, really, is poor in 2010 the same as poor in 1937?

I don’t know if it is better… or worse. But even in this information age, we seem to obscure the reality from our minds. The money well is drying up. And the politicians keep shouting about adding jobs and cutting taxes. Because cutting taxes will make people want to buy more stuff. And that… will somehow… stop the poverty chasm from deepening. 

Those carefully spun phrases sound nice and all… but is that a solution? If we like history and our forebears so much, why don’t we look at their solutions? How did they get out of economic depression? Well, people debate that. Was it the New Deal? Or the war? Or the fact that people just gave up stuff? They went without. Mostly, they had no choice. But… people rationed butter and sugar… and gas. They recycled material to make new clothes out of old. They ate less, spent less, used less… and then worked harder when there was a war and half the work force went someplace else to fight. 

I didn’t live in the past. It’s easy for me to look in a history book or at a well lit photo and think, yeah, they got a good idea. I didn’t live it… but… I still think they had something more right than we do now. 

They gave up stuff for the greater good.

Maybe that’s just the naïve liberal hippy that still lives in me talking… but, hm, isn’t using less what it means to conserve?