If Money Were No Object

I wrote my very first submitted essay assignment of spring semester today. Since it is technically a blog post, each student gets a little creative license-- with the ability to include pictures and add anecdotes and what not. Basically what I do here except for over there it's graded. Tonight you get a little "in" to my academic side.

I thought maybe sharing family stuff would be a little too personal at first, but then remembered that this girl basically sprawled her emotional anger issue problems that involved her dad giving up a high profile job in D.C. as an anesthesiologist to go to South Dakota and work as a general practitioner on one of the indian reserves for a major salary cut and to take a "hick" wife and how she has mixed feelings about it because she's trying to keep up the image of a socialites daughter living in the city with her mom from whom he was divorced. Up against that I felt obligated to bring an honesty to my story as well.

When I first heard her drama, my response was "wow, that's messed up." But she was willing to admit it. And in order to express the redemption in our family that I believe comes from knowing God and asking his help and forgiveness, I have to be up to exposing the flaws that need tending to in the first place.

More to come on the topic of flaws and money. In a God-sized amount.

Money, Objectified

by Sadie Smith

I distinctly remember Christmas 2008 at the Smith household. My mother instigated what was a good-natured little conversation piece at dinner. The “game” was called, “if money was no object.” The objective was to go around the table—my parents, two siblings, and sister-in-law—and explain what we would gift each other with and why if money was no object. According to Juliet Schor, however, there was more at play than an innocent game. Whether or not we realize it, families around the proverbial American dinner table find themselves in a world of desire that both contributes to and is the product of a new consumerism.

Schor asserts on page 71 of her book The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need, that “while fantasy and imagination are important, we should not lose sight of the fact that much of this wishing is really wanting—wanting that turns into buying.” My family borders on the bracket Schor describes—the half of the world’s richest country who say they can’t afford all they need. It’s not an income issue and our standard of living is hardly poor—indeed it is quite the opposite—but the pinch at the end of the month stems from poor money management. The problem, Schor points out, is that the GDP has increasingly become our nations plumb line for true quality of life (21). We buy more, we spend more, we produce more, sure. Still, does a perpetual want for more actually lead millions of Americans to the established social position they, according to Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class, aspire to as they continue spending the money they do not have? (6) Judging by survey results that show many think “materialism is ruining the country, perverting our values, and damaging our children,” competitive consumption for the sake of status is hardly making life better for the Smiths—no matter how it may look to the Joneses or whoever the increasingly unattainable “reference group” happens to be this year (24).

The reason this consumerist culture persists, argues Schor, is not because of a natural, personal or individual tendency to find worth in consumption. Instead, it has much to do about habitus—socially produced tastes that indicate whether or not an individual “fits in” (29). Somewhere along the way, producers and their representatives received the power to determine which items would carry what status. It is a code system so engrained that even if money was no object, a person would reach for the polo shirt over the knock off Wal-Mart style because it is “better” (39). The same code system leads people to spend more money on a living room verses a bedroom or on lipstick verses moisturizer. We invest in visible symbols to simply be seen (45-51). If we are not spending to keep up, we are buying to look different. As we discussed in class, people first went green to be different, though it is now a fad. The video we watched pointed out that trends begin with the individual thinkers, the free spirits, the cool. Keeping up with cool, and spending to do so, has become our national pastime as marketing agencies fight to stay ahead of cool and sell their product to the Smith family of 30,000 dollars as they do to the Jones family of 300,000 dollars. The message is if you have the money, perfect. If you do not have the money, then it will be worth the splurge. What results when the Smiths simply cannot afford to splurge is a world of debt (73). They are told not to be jealous, but encouraged every day in many ways to compete by upscaling. The concern about debt gets taken out back with the old cabinets, now remodeled, as, like teenagers, consumers like the Smiths just try to keep up and stay “in.”

There is a point in time for many families, as there has been for mine, when we cannot simply pile the recycling on top of our debt and call it a day, having done our part to change the world with our earth-consciousness. For these families, money has long not been an object—it has been a swipe of a plastic rectangle. There comes a sobering realization that money is, indeed, an object, and there can be a lack of it. This epiphany might mean cutting back on what you buy for the parents you admire and the siblings you adore. Though I would like to offer them so much more at the time of year that inspires me to love my family the way I believe God loved the world when he sent his son on Christmas, it is also very freeing to come to the knowledge that money is just an object and that, subjectively, social status is not really all the Jones’ crack it up to be. What one does with this information has everything to do with how, and if, we begin to see a change in this consumer culture of ours—a topic of conversation we have already begun to touch on in our discussion of the American downshifter.