I’ve
been thinking a lot about how much we need and about how much we have. Two tragic news stories have especially
impacted me: one is the Oklahoma
tornado, the other the collapse of the garment factory in Bangladesh. More than once, I heard an interview with someone
from Oklahoma who said in so many words, “We lost everything we have…but we
still have each other.” I heard similar
words after Hurricane Sandy and other natural disasters. Often there is a promise to rebuild, and more
than once I’ve heard someone say, “We can always get new things.”
The
promise to rebuild to recover is often lifted up—directly or indirectly—as the true sign of determination and hope.
It
struck me today that I have rarely seen an interview with someone who has lost
everything they’ve had and also lost their loved ones. We will see pictures of them mourning, and we
will see a lot more pictures of help and “consolation” coming in from people
down the block and round the world. I am
grateful that people offer help and consolation. But sometimes I wonder what the
limit of our consolation is. Can we as a
culture stand with and in a tragedy that seems to have no hope: everything gone,
and loved ones gone?
My
guess is that the more than 1,000 workers who died in the factory collapse didn’t
have much stuff to lose. The average
wage for a garment worker in Bangladesh is $37. A month. Which is criminal. And I’m sure more than other workers get in
Bangladesh, and many other countries.
What
is the connection between all the things we have, and those wages? Last week, I heard a snippet on Democracy
Now, talking about how consumption in the US and Europe drive clothing
companies to use cheaper and cheaper labor.
A statistic that jumped out at me was this: the average American buys
twice as much clothing as we did in 1980.
Why? I don’t think it’s because we’re better clothed necessarily, in
terms of quality of clothing. It may be
that spiritually we are more naked than we have been, despite all the clothing
we own.
The
increase in the amount of clothing we buy might be due in part to the fact that
hardly anything is repaired anymore—clothing, electronics, furniture and other
stuff—and that it is “cheaper” to buy new rather than fix something old. (Although there are hidden costs, in terms of
our exploding garbage and carbon problems).
But I think that all of us, even the most frugal, have bought into some
part of the clothing industry’s theology that to be whole, we need to be made
new. In clothes. In spring. In summer. Next year.
I
hated that my parents were so frugal when I was growing up, even though I did
understand the Depression and the War and all. I did not like getting hand-me
downs, and I didn’t like that we got school clothes once a year in the fall,
and bigger than we needed, so hems could be let out as we grew. But I’ve come to see the value of not having
so much stuff, and honoring what we have enough to fix it instead of throwing
it out.
Both
my parents bought into the belief of material progress, and as times got “better”
we got air conditioning, frozen instead of canned juice and so on. But there is
a dark side to our technological progress, and it is seen both in our waste,
and in the working conditions of people in Bangladesh that our consumption
makes necessary.
My
father broke a bone in his back in a jeep accident in England, after the end of
World War II. He didn’t know what he
wanted to do, or could do (he had only finished eighth grade, because his mom
died and he had to help take care of the other children and work on the
farm). He decided to become a barber,
and shared with me a few times how challenging the life was for a North Dakota
farm boy—even one who had seen Europe—to be in postwar Minneapolis, with the
money he could afford for food and rent.
The poem below is about that time.
Be
justice in buying. Be beauty in
consolation.
Patrick
BARBER
COLLEGE, 1946
Your
back no longer good
for
farming, you went to
barber
school on the GI Bill,
rented
a room off the downtown
thrum,
and night after night
rehearsed
your next life.
Snip.
Cut. Clip. The red crease
on
your forefinger and thumb from
holding
scissors all day long,
their
heads unknowable lands.
Your
job to harvest
the
wheat and chaff a man’s
scalp
pushes up every fourteen
days. Sometimes, I imagined
they
sculpted the word fortnight
to
divine your hands: fort: a stone
rebuke;
night: the last word before
the
light goes out.
Each
evening, you took off the white
coat,
shook off the tin hair bits,
the
tailings of gold and coal
your
day coughed up. You walked
down
the back stairway
where
smells of Vitalis and sweat
still
mingled, a troubled marriage. You lit
a
Camel and dwelt in its forgiving
breath
for a moment. Then out onto
Washington
Avenue, where winos
and
streetcar bums had begun
their
rounds. Did you ever
touch
their hair made wild
by
grief, or reach in your pocket
and
hand over a quarter, your next
night’s
meal two slices of bread
smothered
in hot milk? I would like
to
be the spoon you ate with, its tensile
wish,
the way it held up straight
to
your mouth, a smile invading
yours,
the silence it fathered
when
you laid it down on the dark oak table.
Home
to you for many
months,
this city running
to
grab the men the war coughed
back
to its lakes and streets. You hated
its
lights, its velocity, its insistence
on
corn and lumber and steel.
You
went to barber school,
you
told me because you didn’t know
what
else to do. Your fingers
gun-locked,
your eyes opened
to
the distance family breeds in us.
Every
day, you practiced the comb
and
cut, the clippers to the neck,
the
uneasy truce of the straight edge.
I
wonder what your final exam was:
one
crew cut, one heiney,
one
fat old man going quickly bald?
Then,
no more wandering, no crop chasing
or
dark night shooting at enemy planes.
You
had paper now, permission
to
hold men’s heads in your hands
for
the rest of your life.
