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Bailouts and Tough Love - Surveying the Options .
The global financial meltdown is already affecting Canadians in many ways, from lost incomes to lost services at every level of government. Few politicians or pundits can define or solve the crisis in any satisfactory way, except to warn us that resolution may take a long, long time. Perhaps that is a positive sign—that politicians accept a horizon that extends beyond the next election.
Richard Wright once wrote in A Short History of Progress, “We have the tools and the means to share resources, clean up pollution, dispense basic health care and birth control, set economic limits in line with natural ones. If we don’t do these things now, while we prosper, we will never be able to do them when times get hard. Our fate will twist out of our hands. And this new century will not grow very old before we enter an age of chaos and collapse that will dwarf all the dark ages in our past. Now is our last chance to get the future right.”
This is the complex dilemma confronting us as ‘the global meltdown.’
It’s about a search for ways to understand how hard times will affect us and how we can manage and survive them. Our first task is to establish the fine balance between fear and prudence. Fear only cripples. Prudence seeks enabling possibilities.
Scott Piraino observes: “The goal of life in America has always been the same, to own a house, buy a car, in short, to live the American Dream.” While he points out that the dream is no longer valid, many people around the world also want to live that dream, unaware of its real price in social and global degradation.
James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency, wrote about Washington’s illusions of a growth economy in the February 10, 2009 issue of Alternet:
The attempted re-start of revolving debt consumerism is an exercise in futility. We’ve reached the limit of being able to create additional debt at any level without causing further damage, additional distortions, and new perversities of economy (and of society, too). We can’t raise credit card ceilings for people with no ability make monthly payments…We can’t return to the heyday of Happy Motoring, no matter how many bridges we fix or how many additional ring highways we build around our already-overblown and over-sprawled metroplexes. Mostly, we can’t return to the now-complete “growth” cycle of “economic expansion.” We’re done with all that. History is done with our doing that, for now.
A lower ‘standard of living’ seems inevitable. In fact this is a realty for most North Americans. The pejorative term lower is commonly accepted as meaning worse. But this may not always be the case, as we shall explore later.
What may be far worse is that so many people are in a state of denial.
New York Times columnist Frank Rich reminds us that we have bought into dreams of entitlement and unlimited economic growth, and we now live in a culture of denial. “Obama’s toughest political problem may be coping with… an America-in-denial that must hear warning signs repeatedly, for months and sometimes years, before believing the wolf is actually at the door.”(Link)
Can we manage the reality or even handle it? How will we accept the consequences—which may include sustained poverty even starvation for many—as well as the prospect of resource wars?
Writing in quantum.dialog.com, a blog about training, Barbara M. Spiegelman says:
Resistance is the main reaction to change. Consider it thumb sucking for grown ups.
Human beings are creatures of habit. Left to our own devices, some of us would initiate change, but most of us would prefer to retain the status quo. Not because we’re lazy or stubborn, but because we’re human. The status quo is a known entity, and we like it that way. Most of us don’t deal well with the unknown. The unknown is scary, it makes us feel out of control, insecure, and generally as if we would like to go to bed, pull the covers up over our head, and stick our thumb in our mouth.
I was born during the Great Depression of 1929. At that time, Canadians were focused on just coping.
Living in small-town Ontario, our family always had a garden and kept some chickens. I helped my father wrap cabbages and turnips in newspapers and place them in a makeshift root cellar. Our ‘canned’ foods came in reusable Mason jars. We saw oranges only at Christmas. We bought very little packaged food: only flour, sugar, oatmeal and the like. Our bread came wrapped in waxed paper, which my mother carefully saved for folding around school sandwiches. She cooked most of our meals ‘from scratch.’ Saturday night we had our bath, with just a few inches of hot water in the tub. Frugality was a condition of life, a virtue we might emulate today.
Today’s radio news brings the story of a newly laid-off job seeker who can no longer afford the insurance payments on his car. Another item tells of teens who complain that they no longer get their favourite channel, because their parents could afford only the ‘Basic Package.’ (My college granddaughter recently furnished a new apartment. She was grateful for the gift of a older TV. She had never seen ‘rabbit ears’! She never realized that her parents grew up without cable TV.)
As we North Americans face hard times and the inevitable changes in standard of living, we’re going to have to choose which habits or patterns we keep and which ones we can live without.
Many of us are accustomed to a daily bath or shower. Thanks to rising costs of energy and / or water we may have to choose a less frequent schedule. Other rituals, such as golf outings or driving the kids to hockey practice, may be affected.
The food we eat will change. Rising prices and fuel shortages may force choices away from crops grown in warmer climates, such as bananas and oranges to seasonal and locally grown produce. The cost of Captain Shazam’s Wholegrain Powerbits and other packaged cereals may force a rediscovery of plain old oatmeal porridge. (Not all bad, I would argue!)
Other changes are likely: Ride sharing, curtailed holidays, diminished educational and health services. Good dental care — especially for children and older people — plays an important role in health and well-being. This is becoming beyond the reach of the unemployed and those without dental insurance plans.
North Americans can make an inventory of labour-saving ‘aids’ that — according to the gospel of TV — qualify as the ‘proper’ standard of living the one we are entitled to. TV commercials create pressure for manufactured ‘needs’ from computers to cell phones. Even children are targets.
Those ‘needs’ must include a complex array of hardware in every room. In the kitchen, for example, there are whole families of devices for food preparation, including processors, blenders, mixers—even electric knives. Then there are the stoves, toasters and toaster ovens, griddles and the like. We store the food in refrigerators and freezers. The kitchen may even boast a radio or TV. The exercise could be repeated for every room. Consider the array of gadgetry in the living room or den: Hardware - television set, VCR player, DVD player, sound systems with stereo, amplifier and speakers. Software - multi-channel cable TV and sound, VCR and DVD movies as well as CDs.
Each of these items represents an expense. People facing hard times may have to make choices about the technical aids they keep (e.g. paying the rent vs. paying for cable service). Cell phone or land line? Internet service or library? Three hour bus commute or one hour by car pool? In most cases entire families will be affected and must be considered.
What technologies are appropriate today? While this is a matter of personal choice for each of us, we need a dialogue on the real cost of our technologies, not merely in dollars but in time, utility and social benefits.
Dmitri Orlov, author of Reinventing Collapse was recently asked by journalist Marina Portnaya: “What is the best thing Americans can do to prepare for the worst?”
Orlov replied: “The most basic thing they can do is to meet their neighbors. Everyone walks around talking in their cell phone ignoring the people directly around them. There’s very little face-to-face communication, very little sense of community… People should try to work out arrangements where they share responsibilities, where they share whatever they can. [As] I share a car among friends…”
Orlov touched on just one of the trappings of technology that forms a barrier to real communication. We all pass wired iPod zombies who are oblivious to anything around them. People hooked on Twitter can’t wait to intercept or send another 140 character “message.” Cars isolate us from nature and each other with their shells of glass and steel.
In his book Plan C Pat Murphy explores causes of environmental destruction: “Undoubtedly one of the most destructive is the private automobile…The car is more than a mode of transportation—it defines America’s homes and communities. The car has formed our physical communities through suburban sprawl and to a great extent destroyed our social communities. Although the car supposedly represents freedom and independence, it may be the greatest creator of alienation between humans that has ever existed.”
The Worldwatch Institute reports that “the world’s fleet of passenger vehicles is now an estimated 622 million, up from 500 million in 2000 and a mere 53 million in 1950. China continues to expand not only its production but also its domestic car ownership… India’s love affair with the automobile is taking off too.”
TVOntario’s current affairs program, The Agenda, ran a program on auto industry bailouts in which one of the pundits postulated that to survive in its present restructured format, General Motors would have to produce at least 50,000 cars to sell to North Americans.
From the figures available, I estimate the total North American production to be about 30 million cars over last five years.
This raises questions about the obscene propping up of the car industry with trillions of taxpayer dollars. Why do we need more cars? Squandering resources just to save jobs is the wrong reason. Sure, it’s a complicated issue with no easy solutions. But - in my view - throwing money at it won’t help.
One of the solutions proposed includes retooling auto production facilities for mass transit production — surely a long-term possibility, at best. More realistic is Pat Murphy’s proposal for ‘the Smart Jitney,’ a system for sharing cars based on the existing pool and augmented by high-tech computer and GPS links. He contends that “The Smart Jitney can replace the private cars, help restore community and reduce emissions substantially.”
Some B.C. citizens are already active. In 1996 they set up the Victoria Car-Share Co-op, a non-profit cooperative, which shares the ownership and use of vehicles. Ownership, insurance and maintenance of the vehicles are shared among members. Membership costs include a one-time refundable share, a small monthly administration fee, and usage fees based on distance and the amount of time the vehicle has been booked.
Author David Korten, writing in Yes! Magazine, proposes that we place our new reality in a different context:
Corrective action begins with recognition that our economic crisis is, at its core, a moral crisis. Our economic institutions and rules, even the indicators by which we measure economic performance, consistently place financial values ahead of life values.
We have been measuring economic performance against GDP, or gross domestic product, which essentially measures the rate at which money and resources are flowing through the economy. Let us henceforth measure economic performance by the indicators of what we really want: the health and well-being of our children, families, communities, and the natural environment.
Like Korten, I once spent a few years in Indonesia, a so-called Third World country. At that time the majority of people survived without cell phones, without air-conditioning, without cars. State television was available, but few could afford to buy a TV set. Businesses and civil servants were just being introduced to computers. I did not notice any less happiness resulting from this ‘lack.’ In fact my Indonesian friends taught me much about congeniality and joy.
In her excellent guide to developing coping skills, Abundance and Depletion, Sharon Astyk describes her family’s journey into voluntary simplicity and what she calls the subsistence economy, pointing out that subsistence is not necessarily the same as poverty. “Poor agrarian societies generally have stronger social ties. In many cases, people who live in simpler economies, enticed with fewer things they can’t have, report themselves to be happier,”
In hard times, the instinctive urge is to gather up the family. This is easier said than done in many cases. The nuclear family has become the norm in much of Western society. Single-parent families are typical. Where there are two parents, both often work to maintain a the ‘standard of living’ they have chosen. If there are relatives — parents or siblings — these may live some distance away, even in different cities. Consequently we have lost the skills that lubricate relations with family members. Movies like My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Home for the Holidays appeal to us because we envy the underlying family cohesiveness of some ethnic groups.
In my view, the key to economic survival in hard times is community. Many of the writers cited above invite us to rethink community and how we define it. In his thoughtful and well-documented book, Plan C, Pat Murphy points out that “community cohesion is not likely to be restored by simply calling for cooperation in our present affluent and individualistic society… [not until] conditions cause people to come together locally to cooperatively organize their own economic affairs and together deal with the issues of survival.”
One has to be willing to put community (however defined) before more personal considerations. That means being ready to share the load. This gets only lip service in our schools, given the individualistic and persistent WASP culture many of us grew up in.
If there is no group that we can claim for ourselves, perhaps we can invent it, or at least define it. The goal is to rebuild community in a fragmented world. That means finding a place to live with people who share our values and interests. Searching Google with the keywords ‘intentional community’ is an excellent starting place.
As the late Dr. M. Scott Peck relates in The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace, people yearn for community. Dr. Peck committed the latter part of his life to exploring the ways people can learn how to build community.
He once told author Alan AtKisson in an interview, “It takes a significant amount of effort to build community, but it takes even more effort - ongoing effort - to maintain it. The biggest problem with community maintenance, as with community startup, is the problem of organizations simply being willing to pay the price - which is, primarily, a price of time.”
As David Korten says, “Our economic crisis is, at its core, a moral crisis.” Ultimately that moral transformation, is a personal choice that each of us must make.
