What do we need?

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.