I am big. It's the bank accounts that got small

All around us year-end lists are summing up our collective experiences in an orderly fashion, reminding us of the things we missed or challenging us to change our minds about what we didn't.  The last dark day of December is not radically different from the new gray light of January 1st.  We wear the same clothing, eat the same out of season foods and continue to seek out places to put the holiday gifts that have recently entered our lives.   

     I've been thinking a lot about Billy Wilder's 1950 film Sunset Boulevard lately.  Gloria Swanson plays an aging silent film star who is trying to craft a comeback.  A young and near destitute screenwriter stumbles into her life and she takes him under her wing; dressing him, housing him, and hoping for his love in return.

   The butler (played by Erich Von Stroheim) is her former silent film director.  In his devotion he attempts to construct an artificial reality that shields her from the success of talkies and the end of the silent era.  Our heroine can't see she is outmoded and lives that fantasy even as it self-destructs.  Some of her most famous lines ("I am big. Its the pictures that got small") ring with a freaky simultaneity as we end two thousand and great with an odd paradigm shift.  The themes of obfuscation and denial, obsolescence and confusion: the similarities between this film and our present economic meanderings are staggering.

     Fast forward 58 years and we, a nation of spenders, are running out of petty cash.  This year something very different was added to the year end mix that hasn't been fully digested.  What do we do about a lack of money?  Not just a 'I get paid next Friday' lack of funds, but a 'hmmmm, perhaps we need to fully re-evaluate our lifestyle' kind of lack.  For decades, December has been a make or break profit month for American retail.  Some businesses make up to one third of their yearly figures in this holiday shopping period.  But now that the whole idea of job security, an evergreen stock market, and safe savings has been re-fashioned, do we make a quick return to the Waltons era of hand made dolls and slingshots on the first night of Hannukah?

     When I was a child the number of presents under the Christmas tree was always nearly half the height of the tree.  My parents spent heavily on a credit card that they mistakenly empowered with the task of soothing emotional scars from their difficult childhoods.  Christmas became a symbol of giving that signified how much you loved.  Perhaps many children who grew up with post World War II and Baby Boomer parents received the present of excess to make up for loss.  But now it is the excess that has created the loss.  The loss of meaning except for a price tag, has created a culture of shopping as a hobby, shopping as a past time, shopping to show how much you shop!

     How do we, as a nation, turn around the concept of giving? Can we emotionally re-instate its meaning, without crippling our economy?  The notion of stimulating the American economy by shopping seems ludicrous when nearly every purchasable item has already sent our money abroad to be manufactured.  As someone who has a relatively small economic footprint, I feel overwhelmed and uninterested with being held personally responsible for restoring our nations retail health. Although I would love to see manufacturing return locally...

It seems like a huge shift of ideals and outlook to imagine that we can be a nation without all that shopping.  But think of all the free time we will have to listen to the radio!

Comments

[Steve]

Fantastic and touching piece to be read widely.

Keep your money local.

We can buy less things but spend more money in our local economies. Spend as little as you can with multinationals who send 85c of every dollar overseas.

The ultimate goal of the corporate powers is for every citizen of the world to be a global worker slaving for the lowest eurodollaryuan. So starve them out. And the best way we can stop this is to spend our money with local small businesses, manufacturers, and entrepreneurs.

[Dale]

Our spending has gone waaaaayyy down these last couple of years, basically because our income was cut and we realized we needed much less than we consumed. But the bi-monthly trip to the dump (excuse me - transfer station) tells me we still consume too much. Food packaging is a huge part of that. Cans, bottles, cardboard, styrofoam and plastic from fish and chicken, bags from fresh fruits and vegetables, cat food tins (from the cats), newspaper, magazines and cardboard...While most of this gets recycled, it's tough to think of the fuel consumed to repurpose it all: to truck cardboard off somewhere to be bailed up only to be shipped to China to be turned into drywall; to grind up a glass bottle to be mixed with roadsalt so it can eventually wash into the ditch and NOT turn back into another bottle. I don't have any answer, but every time I go grocery shopping I ask why all this packaging is necessary. The recent awareness of wasting petrochemicals to make plastic shopping bags is just the beginning. Oh, and the Stroheim mention makes me want to see the Blue Angel again. THAT movie is a downer, too.

[Dale]

Our spending has gone waaaaayyy down these last couple of years, basically because our income was cut and we realized we needed much less than we consumed. But the bi-monthly trip to the dump (excuse me - transfer station) tells me we still consume too much. Food packaging is a huge part of that. Cans, bottles, cardboard, styrofoam and plastic from fish and chicken, bags from fresh fruits and vegetables, cat food tins (from the cats), newspaper, magazines and cardboard...While most of this gets recycled, it's tough to think of the fuel consumed to repurpose it all: to truck cardboard off somewhere to be bailed up only to be shipped to China to be turned into drywall; to grind up a glass bottle to be mixed with roadsalt so it can eventually wash into the ditch and NOT turn back into another bottle. I don't have any answer, but every time I go grocery shopping I ask why all this packaging is necessary. The recent awareness of wasting petrochemicals to make plastic shopping bags is just the beginning. Oh, and the Stroheim mention makes me want to see the Blue Angel again. THAT movie is a downer, too.

[K]

What you discover when you take away the toys and shiny objects is two things. One, that the people around you, and your relationships to them, are your actual worth. The second is that the physical (natural) world has great intrinsic value. This fact has been heavily obscured by our disconnection from it due to our lifestyle. Most people now live in cities and suburbs, where the natural world has been beaten into submission. It is said, "something is boring as watching grass grow". Well, try it sometime. Growing grass is more interesting to watch than the latest Will Smith vehicle, I can tell you.

[Mark Allen]

And the award for best blog post title of the year goes to...

[Texecution]

My family wasn't too well off- or rather my parents focused a lot more heavily on sending their 3 sons to college and not so much on the Christmas presents- so now that I'm 30 I have no desire for gifts *at all.* It was tough growing up the only one of my friends without Nintendo, but the lack of student loans more than makes up for it. Anyways, I fully expect my kids to hate me for my absolute refusal to buy them tons of gifts, but they'll grow up to receive the greatest gift of all: a lack of entitlement.
(I meant that kind of joking, but also kind of not.)

[rusty beltway]

Comment #1 is right on: buy local as much as you can.

By February the retail numbers should be in and decisions will be made by the chains and big boxes. As trend forecaster Gerald Celente says: the next shoe to drop will be commercial real estate. Malls may be empty. Or for sale.

The possibility is that mom & pop opperations and small towns may start to bounce back. Bartering may become a viable alternative currency.