Saturday, October 29, 2011 – Night Howl #1

The theme(s) for tonight -

“citizens vs. consumers” and “a future for our grandchildren”

First up, “citizens versus consumers.“

Five or six years ago I started ranting about this commonly accepted notion that we are consumers, first and foremost. That our behavior was always being described in relation to consuming; and that our sole worth as beings is being measured in terms of how much we can spend and where we choose to spend it. The refrain being that our only power is our power as consumers. We are being marched to our graves accepting this more and more as the way things are.

The real “emperor has no clothes” horror of this idea crystallized for me one day while I was driving to work, listening to Diane Rehm talk about healthcare. In the midst of the conversation,  I suddenly heard her asking her guest panelists (who they were I cannot remember) “but what about us as healthcare consumers?” Healthcare consumers? What the hell?

“What do you mean, consumer? Consumer?! WHAT ABOUT CITIZEN???” I bellowed at the radio. Diane Rehm had swallowed that nifty trick of language and was blithely accepting at face value the insidious notion we “consume” healthcare. She was not questioning at all the craziness of a world where our need for care when we are sick, ailing, dying, broken and in pain is somehow conflated with the marketplace.  As if needing pain relief or an operation was the same thing as buying a car.

My dismay, my argument, if you will, is that we are a social animal who must live together in societies. It is just who we are. We also are conscious beings, and therefore have both the ability and the responsibility to ask ourselves “what kind of world do I want to live in? What kind of social behavior will best benefit my species and the world that supports us?”

So I ask…what would a world look like where people are taken care of when they are sick? Where there is a sense of what belongs in the marketplace and what simply DOES NOT?

“a future for our grandchildren”

I was reading Kurt Vonnegut’s book A Man Without a Country last week. It was funny, wry and smart, but it was also deeply grim. He was 81 or 82 when he wrote it and he’d been watching the same things happening in this first decade of the 21st century that I had and had come to many of the same dire conclusions.

In one sentence, as the concluding thought in one of his pieces, Vonnegut said, “I don’t know many people who are dreaming of a future for their grandchildren.” Is there anything sadder?

I hope that there are others who see past this grimness I feel, and can counteract my dire feelings with a realizable vision of sustainability and optimism that Kurt and I simply cannot muster. I’m only 57, so if I’m lucky, I have miles to go before I sleep. I’m going to keep my eyes and ears and heart open for an optimistic vision of the future.  Anyone?

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