Buy Local, Buy Responsible

Happy Chriskwazukka everyone! Its that buying and soon to be gift-giving time of year again. Actually, its has been the buying time since before Thanksgiving, which is totally ridiculous. That very fact alone is enough to make me want to join a certain church. But, I suppose I am a little late in starting to properly rail against it this year. Anyhoo...

I enjoy getting and giving gifts as much as the next person. At the same time, I am keenly aware of the trend in our materialist society to get what is wanted over what is needed. I don't mean to speak ill of this entirely. I have friends whose families ask "What do you want for Christmas?" and stick solely to the answers given. This is, at the very least, highly efficient. Efficiency is good. And truly, if one leads the life of temperance and frugality the whole year through, the holidays are a great time to throw caution to the wind and consume with gluttonous abandon. Generally speaking, I don't find this to be the American way. In fact, all the year though it would seem that its quite the opposite. I point to our debt culture and obesity statistics as corroborating proof.

All that isn't good. Its easy to say it doesn't matter, though. Its the holidays, right? We're supposed to splurge. Well, yes and no. The giving of gifts be it over eight nights or on one morning binge is a wonderful thing and culturally is distinctly American. Realizing this, it is far from incumbent upon me or any other to cure the illness by killing the patient. But, I'd like to tweak the patient and change their mindset as much as I could, if I could. Stick with me.

While there are reactionary movements against things like Black Friday, they'll never fly with any kind of majority in the United States. They are good ideas to be sure, but lets be realistic and pragmatic about it. It takes the far left to advance the center, but when the center's average weight is over 200 lbs., its not going to move very far very fast. Think in responsible baby steps. Buying gifts that people need is a great idea. Not that all you should be getting is socks and underwear, but using some creativity can get the job done with none of the gift giving potency lost. Moreover, consider the ways of giving. If you had to get socks for someone, maybe get them organic cotton or hemp woven socks. Buck the trend while in the trend. That's one way to go. The other, easier and perhaps more immediately beneficial way to do your shopping is to buy local. Don't shop at a chain store. Don't buy anything mass produced by some company that outsources all of its labor and materials to China. This way, your gift can have the added bonus of being unique or having some local color about it, perhaps.

Another way to think of it is that you are voting with your dollar and by spending, you are choosing what you support. Do you support your neighborhood or community? Do you support socially responsible or sustainable businesses and/or their products? Or, do you support saving two bucks and some big business that might churn out some banal and lesser quality items. More gently put, if you buy local, whatever it is, you are giving two gifts. One, obviously to the person who receives the gift, but the other to the place where you live. Its easy to forget that one of the things that sustains cities, towns and neighborhoods is business. So, if you like where you live and call it home, bear some of this stuff in mind. Its certainly not the solution, but its a start.

Katrina, the Poor and Security

After reading this post from The American Scene, I was left with a couple of burrs in my saddle about the way that America is set up. It has long been my opinion that the social structure and economy of this country are far too reliant on the automobile. And yes, fossil fuels as well. I am sure there are those out there will say “Yeah, so?” So, seeing that so many people decided to stay in their homes or in their towns/cities despite grave warnings warrants an examination of their decision making process. The post from TAS looks into that and determines that many people were living paycheck to paycheck or were so precarious in their living situations, i.e. they would rather stay and guard what they have lest their belongings be taken by looters and risk life and limb rather than just forfeit it all and leave it to fate to decide how they end up. As Reihan states, if your means only provide a paycheck to paycheck lifestyle, you are “always one paycheck away from disaster.”

So, many of these people were simply unable to leave. They didn’t have cars. They couldn’t afford cabs. And, indirectly because of the social conditions that often accompany poor neighborhoods; they lacked a community to fall back upon that could bear them. The option to rely on family was not their either because of economic status or simply sheer lack of kin. They couldn’t afford to save themselves.

But this is all peripheral to the point I want to make.

My borrowing the phrase from John Edwards is by no means an endorsement of him, but the fallout from Katrina has clearly illustrated beyond any doubt that there are truly two Americas. Oversimplifying it for the sake of this argument, the “Haves” own cars and/or are able to do things to insure themselves against harm, which in this case was to get out of New Orleans. The “Have Nots” were unable to do much and, either out of desperation or inability to find (and pay for) transportation, stayed and forced to endure what came. Many paid for that choice, if you can call it that, with their lives. I am nauseous at the prospect of whatever the final death toll may be.

The point is, this country is out of balance in so many ways and we have to do something about it. The best way to address a huge problem is to start looking for simple ways to solve it, or at least part of it. What if those people who didn’t have cars did have access to trains buses, or other mass transit? This one element would not have solved the problem of getting people out of Katrina’s path, but it certainly would have helped.

What I would love to do now is shoot off on a tangent that imparts my loathing of car culture and the status that it carries and how the automobile industry has been the single largest malignancy in this country since World War II. However, that will be for another post. What I will say is that it is America’s dependence on the car, abetted by the oil business has been, in the long run, at the very least, partially responsible for the class divide in the United States today. Granted, the greed of the American consumer goes hand in hand with them. How many SUVs and luxury lines of automobiles do you need? Did you notice who stayed or was left behind in New Orleans?

Follow me in this leap. What if we broadened the idea of security beyond protection from religious fundamentalists trying to kill us? (Note that I left out the word Islamic) What if security applied to the overall strength and resiliency of our society? You could even include the notion of sustainability in defining security. So, to beat a dead horse, our fuel supply is not secure because we are at the mercy of foreign powers who set the price and as a result, have undue influence on our economic security.

Just watch the United States in the coming weeks call on OPEC to increase its production in efforts to help our recovery from this cataclysm. Sure it will be in the spirit of charity, but truly, it will be just like the dealer giving a junkie a bigger hit to tide him over until he gets through this rough patch.

As with 9/11, the toll will be great and the recovery will take years. What concerns me now is how we will recover. Will state and local leaders be able to see the problems that led to this for what they really were and are? Will our national leaders be able to see past politics and give the affected region what it needs in order to recover and make things better than they were before? Will the American people be able to recognize that there was a bold dividing line in race and class when observing who was affected by this? It will take leadership and vision. Again, as sad as this all of this is, it represents a tremendous opportunity for change in a positive direction that can serve as a glowing example to the rest of the country, if not the world.

Then again, we could just let it all go, as Dennis Hastert thinks.