Home and Economics
My father's father, who was born in 1887, was the fifth of seven children. He grew
up on a farm near Sharpsburg, Maryland. I've been told that, as a young man, he
determined he would not try to eke out a living by farming. He was so very determined
that he bicycled up and down and across the mountains to Pittsburg, looking for something
better. I never got all the details of that escapade; all I know is that he came
back and settled down in Hagerstown, Maryland, not very far from Sharpsburg. But
true to his early determination, he supported himself and his family by working in a furniture
factory, which was a long way from the farm of his family of origin.
My father, who was born in 1911, the second of eight children, grew up in a house
in the working class section of Hagerstown--a house that was within easy walking
distance of the factory where his father worked. Daddy started working very early,
running errands for pennies, then delivering papers, finally quitting school after a few weeks
into the tenth grade to apprentice himself to the neighborhood electrician. I once
heard him say that he helped wire most of the houses in the South End of town.
The older of my two brothers, who was born in 1939, the third of six children, like
most kids had a series of after school jobs for pay including what we often called
his "udder" job. When we moved out beyond the city limits, he was hired to help
prepare cows for milking at the farm across the road behind our house. After high school,
he did a stint in the army in Kansas, then returned home and used his army training
in accounting in his work at IBM.
Our second son, who was born in 1965, one of four children, began working part time
at age 16 in food service--washing dishes, preparing salad bars, "busing" tables,
waiting on customers. He went to college in Ohio and New York, graduating with
a degree and an abiding interest in United States history. He now works in Virginia as a
manager of a fast food restaurant with no time to garner the credits he needs to
be able to pursue the teaching career which is his dream.
Four generations in a hundred years. Four generations during which the economic reality
of living in the United States has undergone tremendous change.
On the family farm all family members worked to provide for today's table and next
season's; and, even though much depended on the vagaries of weather, there was some
possibility of living off the land. But the factory grew neighborhoods with families
housed close to the fathers' work. Fortunate families like my grandparents' lived in
single houses with big yards and chicken coops back by the alley so there would be
fresh eggs and chicken to augment the garden produce. It got them through the Great
Depression.
Electricity and telephones and cars, Depression, and then World War. Skilled folks
like my father who was a little too old with too many dependents to be called into
the military now worked such crazy hours in the defense factories that some victory
gardens didn't get the attention they might have. Housewives who didn't join the work
force at that time nonetheless found that electric washing machines and vacuum cleaners
and even nonmechanized brushes specially engineered for specific jobs only made nearly
enough time for the increasing managment of coupons and the creation of ways to provide
for families restricted by rationing and the scarcity of many items of food and clothing.
But radio and movies and Sunday sermons kept everyone aware that there was a true cause
for all the busy-ness and hardship.
The post war era with its booms and busts and continuing war-induced technological
creativity produced even more neighborhoods.
Growing corporations needed managers and engineers and the developing middle class
needed professionals of various kinds. Education and credentials became entry passports
to the new family, The Family which had metamorphosed into the ultimate consuming
unit of a changing economy with more discretionary funds and more leisure time supported
by a sense of job security by way of reciprocal loyalty between employer and employee.
And the United Sates was indeed the world power it had grown into as a result of its participation in World War II.
Smaller wars abroad, police actions at home and abroad, and one Cold War later, the
competition between the traditional economies that had vied with each other for world
dominance is over. "Our side" has been proclaimed the winner. The spoils are ours--more people, fewer jobs, homelessness, epidemics, increasing distance between the
rich and the poor, infrastructure breakdowns, and more goods than we can afford or
consume. Young people who work and borrow and get through school are faced with
a dearth of opportunities in their fields of choice and what work there is demands uneven schedules
and long hours and, more often than not, at least two incomes per household.
Somewhere along the way the old definition of "economy" as minimal or no waste disappeared.
This last quarter of the Twentieth Century, the mind-set that undergirds the use
and exploitation of the real resources of our planet home has changed drastically. In its place, from people to raw materials, we think instead of expendability
and planned obsolescence and "if it's broken, throw it away because there's more
where that came from--and what's more, it's cheaper!" And now, the "Global Economy"
that seems certain to usher us into the twenty-first century sounds like it ought to be a
unifying force binding the nations and peoples of the world at last into one acknowledged
family. But instead it belongs to the few who wield unrestricted and unrestrained
power over the monetary wealth of the world. There is no loyalty to workers; no involvement
in communities; no regulations to hold corporations, banks, and such answerable to
the larger good of people or planet. Under the rubric of "free" econ-omy and the proclaimed justice of competition, the few who wield the power of money move factories
and production centers to arenas of cheapest labor, thus "saving"--that is amassing
more money for CEO's and shareholders while using working people around the world
according to a mind set more closely akin to that of the slave holders of our earlier
history. As many of you well know, the old worker versus manager dichotomy no longer
holds under this system either. Middle managers now get dismissed abruptly so that
long time, loyal employees like my brother find themselves years short of retirement
age, but "retired" nonetheless with consultancy fees to help to pick up the slack
of health insurance and such. And Unitarian Universalist minsters must rely on special
pension plan savings invested in stocks and bonds to be there for our retirement.
In hope, we then participate in a system that has no loyalty to us and which our
elected government is no longer able to regulate for reliability. We, no less than the "cheap
laborers" of southern states and oriental countries, are hostages, slaves of the
same system that consistently makes its decisions on the basis of immediate monetary
return rather than looking at the future costs to people and planet.
William Greider, in an article adapted from his book ONE WORLD,READY OR NOT says:
The genuine meaning of "one world" will be tested by how nations answer this question:
Can the global system be turned toward a less destructive path without throwing poor
people over the side?
Greider focuses here particularly on the poor and on the debtor nations. But another
writer, Paul Hawken, speaks to problems of and oppor-tunities for the whole planet
involved in the expansion of global corporations. In the opening chapter of THE
ECOLOGY OF COMMERCE, Hawken states:
The ultimate purpose of business is not, or should not be, simply to make money.
Nor is it merely a system of making and selling things. The promise of business
is to increase the general well-being of humankind through service, a creative invention
and ethical philosophy. Making money is, on its own terms, totally meaningless, an insufficient
pursuit for the complex and decaying world we live in. We have reached an unsettling
and portentous turningpoint in industrial civilization. It is emblematic that...mother's milk would be banned by the food safety laws of industrialized nations
if it were sold as a packaged good. What's in the milk besides milk and what's suppressing
our immune system is literally industry--its by-products, wastes, and toxins. Facts like these lead to an inevitable conclusion: Businesspeople must either dedicate
themselves to transforming commerce to a restorative undertaking, or march society
to the undertaker.
Hawken's definition of such a transformation is one that imitates the closed system
we live in as inhabitants of the planet:
The restorative economy comes down to this: We need to imagine a prosperous commercial
culture that is so intelligently designed and constructed that it mimics nature at
every step, a symbiosis of company and customer and ecology.
...
Today, when many people's bodies in industrial nations are, technically speaking,
too toxic to be placed in land fills, it is time to establish a pathway to eliminate
the poisons, a chain of actions and consequences that energizes business, that stimulates innovation, that preserves employment, and restores the environment. A cyclical,
restorative economy thinks cradle-to-cradle so that every product or by-product is
imagined in its subsequent forms even before it is made. ... Responsibility belongs
to the maker, not merely the user, and certainly not with the victim.
I submit this morning that we are all makers, users and
victims. As investors and shareholders we belong to the "maker" elite. As consumers,
of course, we are users. And as late Twentieth Century human inhabitants of Planet
Earth at risk as we breathe the air and drink the water, let alone dependent on the
work opportunities provided by global corporations we are victims.
Of course, there is no going back: living off the land may be possible for a few,
but our numbers have increased so that there is not room enough--the family farm
is a thing of the past. Even a planting garden and keeping chickens is not possible
for most folks--there's not enough space for the variety and excess to insure enough in
spite of bad weather for the one, and neither space nor zoning permission for the
other. We've come along way since my grandfather pedalled into the Industrial Revolution.
And there is no way we can stay where we are. Change is constant. History goes on--at
least until the last of us can no longer tell the tale of what we and our parents
and grandparents have experienced.
What can we do, we makers and users and victims? Several things come to mind: Aware
of the irritation change produces in us, we can
(1) wallow in it, thus having the opportunity to play ain't it awful
everytime the subject comes up; or, perhaps, we could take the time to look at it
closely and mine that irritation for the gem-bearing ore of answers embedded in the
problem.
(2) We can deny it by focussing on something or everything else,hoping that our
inattention will make it go away. (Well, we do know that time will bring about some
other change.)
(3) We can choose to acknowledge our complicity and our complacency; then, looking
more closely at what is happening to ourselves, to those around us and to the others
beyond our usual spheres of living, we may not be able to make the changes we would like to see in others, but we can alter our own customary ways of thinking and behaving
and reacting so that we can begin to add the weight of our influence in the direction
of our choice.
In keeping with the Principles which help form our identity as Unitarian Universalists,
I, for one, would look to find ways to turn the currents of Global capitalism away
from its tendency to belittle human worth and its easy violations of the Web of Life. A true economy for the twenty-first century, then, be it local or global, would
be regulated by governments of the people, by the people and for the people who recognize
that our interdependence within this closed system of life on Earth cannot endure
and abide corporations responsible only to an imperative to grow money. Our planet
home and the human family resident within it this spring of 1997 are in desperate
need of an economics of restoration and care.
The sermon in a Unitarian Universalist setting is never the last word
on any subject, but rather an invitation to further dialog.
You may want to read other visitors'
comments on Beverly Bumbaugh's "Home and Economics"
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Bill Griffeth
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