Uncovered by Susie Davis

Author:Susie Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL012050
ISBN: 9781441212177
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2010-04-30T16:00:00+00:00

It’s All Relative

Our problem, in truth, is that we probably don’t even understand what materialism looks like. We feel that cutting back from daily Starbucks visits to three times a week is a serious hardship. That paying five bucks for a smoothie at Jamba Juice is a steal of a meal, especially when you can add in a wheatgrass shot for under a buck. (Woohoo, what a bargain.) We think that buying a new sofa on credit without having to start paying for it for twelve months is totally reasonable. And that carrying somewhere in the ballpark of ten thousand dollars on a credit card is “normal.” Truth be told, we’ve had some freewheeling ways for decades.

David Leonhardt, of the New York Times, seems to think that the current economic crisis is, well, to put it bluntly, our own fault. “It’s your fault. Part of it is, anyway. You, the American consumer, spent too much money. You bought too much house, took on too much debt and generally lived beyond your means. Your free-spending ways helped cause the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.”6 Thanks for the love there, David. But if that is the case—and we are indeed the generation that has been living this way for decades and the ones who created a national debt that has hit the trillion-dollar mark—we really aren’t the ones with the insight to figure our way out of it.

But hopefully there are still some people around who understand what materialism looks like and how to unleash themselves from its deadening stranglehold. Maybe your grandparents or great-grandparents remember when just having a little sugar in their coffee was a serious indulgence. I doubt they would have dreamed of buying food at a restaurant for three times the price that it could easily be made at home. They probably would have scoffed at the idea of buying new furniture when they didn’t have money for it, especially when they had perfectly good pieces at home. Because they are the people who not only fought their way through the Great Depression with an unfailing attitude by demonstrating loads of self-control, but they also managed to get through it all with a marriage intact.

As a result of the constant news of our faltering economy, my local paper recently featured three couples, all in their eighties and nineties, who were raised during the Great Depression. Each couple was interviewed about the lessons learned in surviving the most severe depression our country has ever experienced. And all the advice was interesting. But the thing that pinged my conscience the most was the tenderness in the way the photographer captured the couples. They were delightedly hanging on to each other, relishing that they were tucked away at Sun City, a modest retirement community just outside Austin.

When I looked at their pictures, it made me realize that when I near the end of my life, it won’t matter how many toys I’ve collected, how big my house was, or

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