Hip to be poor

I feel like I’ve been waiting for this day all my life…it’s finally hip to be poor. Celebrities, industrialists, investment bankers all feel the sting. Waitresses, lawyers, fishermen, brain surgeons, we all share the same leaking boat now. Almost exactly a year ago, the entire country sat mesmerized before the sight of the stock market in freefall, frozen like deer in the headlights at the sight of our retirement funds, college accounts, life savings, hopes, dreams & reasons for living dissolving into thin air. Hello…Can you say "new reality"? Today you can’t open a magazine or newspaper without being bombarded by inane suggestions on how to save what little money you have left – switch from Starbucks to Dunkin! Shop at Wal-Mart! Buy generic! Olay instead of La Mer! – stratagems with about as much effectiveness as trying to stop an incoming tide with a sieve, and which offer the added stupidity of relying upon the same consumerist paradigm that got us here in the first place - buy this instead of that. Save more by spending…less. Discussion of dwindling finances is the subject du jour in the public forums, and if you want to participate in the conversation, you’d better be prepared to talk poor. It’s the chic thing to be. Poor is the new green. In the red is the new black.

This new hipness takes many forms. Some people are of course really poor. Homeless poor, hungry poor, street person poor. People sleeping on subway grates, wearing plastic garbage bags instead of clothes. Others are newly desperate, the foreclosure & short sale & unemployed poor. Many are recent arrivals to poordom, members of the struggling and debt-ridden middle class. And then of course there are the relatively affluent but still less-rich-than-they-were upper strata. Regardless of where you stand on the scale, you’ve probably had some sort of unpleasant reality to adjust to over the past 12 months. If you’re lucky, you’ve done some thinking as well.

Because that’s the one thing that no one has really been addressing – the thinking that landed us in this mess. Buy-spend-buy-spend-buy-spend…what passes for contemporary American “culture” - and its value system - depends entirely upon consumer spending. It’s the engine that makes our society run. We measure our worth by our net-worth, our success by our financial assets, who we are by what we have. If this recent crisis forces us to do nothing more than examine the structureless underbelly of what we believe, it will have served a useful purpose. Raise your hand if you’ve spent your adult life in the service of a financial lie, presenting a prosperous face to the world, while all the time running as fast as you could to keep up. I know I have. Expensive shoes, jewelry, travel experiences, beauty products. Name brands. Never a dime to my name, little in savings, everything leveraged and borrowed against and perpetually in motion, Peter paying Paul paying Peter. I refinanced my house 3 times in the past 8 years. My current mortgage is now three times what my house’s original asking price was. I am not a stupid person. My IQ is 130. The New York Times is delivered to my door daily. I re-read War & Peace, just for fun, ha ha. But wait a second…if I’m so smart, then how come I’m so poor? And didn’t I KNOW better than to get sucked into the machine? Didn’t I read Thoreau and Emerson in college? Didn’t I swear I’d never adopt the shallow materialist values of my parents? Didn’t I have IDEALS? Didn’t me and my friends who grew up in the sixties utterly reject the whole shallow consumerist paradigm?

The truth is that none of us have escaped it. I doubt anyone in this culture CAN escape it. It’s too pervasive. We can no longer even string together our thoughts in non-economic terms. We are “consumers”. We are “products”, products of our culture and products of our times, flipping through magazines, surfing 150 channels, defining ourselves by the aptly-named “goods” that we buy and the purchases that we make, our $1500 handbags, our $900 shoes, our adjustable rate mortgages. We live it, we breathe it, we dream it. We are it.

Well, now the alarm clock has gone off. And unpleasant shock that it’s been, it feels good to finally be awake again. There’s something bracing about finally facing reality. It’s like I always knew this was going to happen, that my past “success” was a triumph of smoke and mirrors and empty values, that it would all come to an end one day, but now that it has, oddly I don’t feel all that bad about it. I’m still here. So are you. No fear, no regrets. Now move on.