Friday, August 04, 2006

spending beyond our means

I’ve been reading about consumer debt in the United States. Our insatiable appetite for cheap borrowing has resulted in many Americans mortgaging their houses to pay for expensive toys. A country without much of a past, we now seem incapable of thinking about the future; our minds focused on endless desiring, the infinite now.
So sign us up for big screen TVs, for cruises and a new car every two years; what’s the matter with a new set of golf clubs, with another pair of shoes, a breakfast nook and a new bay window? Don’t we need a new grill, a riding lawn mower, a faster computer, a digital video recorder? It seems to me that our lives have become so suffused with work that we now believe that the good life has be purchased, instead of lived.

Reading these stories, about people with such a hunger for a different life that they borrow without any possibility of repaying, made me think about our foreign policy.

It seems to me that Americans have a tendency to buy things pitched to us by charlatans. In 2002, the vast majority of us approved of a war to remove Saddam Hussein. Gulf War II sounded good to us! The first one was fun and besides we already knew who the bad guy was.

The emotion that led us there was not unjustified – the 9/11 attacks on American soil were deeply unsettling, and the country longed for a return to safety. But we transferred that legitimate desire to an unrelated thing. It’s something like a mother that misses spending time with her husband and children, who channels that unvoiced desire onto a Viking stove. The stove represents cooking, meals together, shared time gathered at the hearth. But buying objects that represent unfulfilled needs traps us in the very life that was depriving us. We have to keep working to pay the growing bills, and while we are busy the stove gathers dust.

Unfortunately the American people failed to take account of the APR on our National Credibility Card. It looks like the rate’s variable. Iraq is ours now, and the cost of this impulse purchase will just keep going up.

But as Americans usually are, I am optimistic. Frugality and delaying gratification used to be a source of pride in this country. This is my prayer: when we get out of this hole we’ve dug for ourselves, may we as a nation have finally learned to read the fine print.


(I got the stove = family time image from a book I read or an article somewhere, but I can’t remember what it was. If anyone comes across it please let me know so I can give proper credit.)