No more gilding the lily
“To gild refined gold, to paint the lily… is wasteful and ridiculous excess.”
—Shakespeare, from King John (1595):
This morning my son and I were planning his 10th birthday party. I live in East Town Tosa, a neighborhood that straddles the border between affluent aspirations and working class reality. His first few years of school, in the early 2000s, I was frequently faced with extravagant birthday parties and gift-giving that felt like either intense competition between parents or the setting of an unhealthy precedent. Of course, everyone’s intentions were good, but it still bugged me. So each year when Harry’s turn to “celebrate” came, I sent a note to parents asking that he not receive gifts in excess of $20 and informing them that we would not open presents at the party, but would send thank-you’s afterward. To my surprise, a few parents whispered their approval in my ear, though just a few took up the call.
Harry’s parties get great reviews – we’ve done a backyard campout, a day at Miller Beach, an all-night Star Wars movie-thon (complete with light saber battles in the living room) and my favorite – inviting three boys over to pick up all the sticks in my yard, then burning them in the fire pit while roasting marshmallows. Two for one, everybody wins! And here’s what you don’t see at his get-togethers: boys comparing the gifts they brought; begging for more tokens when they run out first; crying quiet tears in the back seat because they didn’t win a big prize at the arcade.
It just goes to show another apparent deficiency in our education system: the lack of emphasis on cautionary tales. The Panic of 1893, the 1907 Bankers Panic (the 4th in 34 years), the Crash of 1929, the Great Depression, the 1973 oil crisis, the 1979 energy crisis, the 1990 oil crisis leading to the Gulf War, five recessions in less than 30 years. The list is incomplete, but long enough to establish a pattern: We rise, we fall. As individuals we don’t control market forces except when we do or don’t buy flat screen TVs and houses, which weren’t put on this earth, at any rate, because God wants us to be happy, but to create profit for the seller.
It’s not a nefarious arrangement inherently; the exchange of goods and services has been powering human development since the beginning. But when we use self-gratification as dominant personal compass, we never fail to screw ourselves.
Some good things have occurred in response to our failures of excess – the Federal Reserve, the Progressive Era, the New Deal, the Civil Rights Act and many others. And that’s what I see beginning to happen now on a neighborhood level. People are reconsidering mass transit and I think they will soon demand it; affordable health care is a top priority; “Made in the USA” can actually influence purchase decisions. Previous arguments against solar and wind power development are starting to sound as ludicrous to the public at large as they have always sounded under scrutiny.
On a microcosmic, but possibly more significant level, we’re thinking more about what we need than what we impulsively want and probably assigning greater value to what we have. We’re taking better care of our stuff and helping each other out. We made fun of our grandparents for that, but it turns out they were pretty smart, after all. My father is retiring on my grandfather’s savings. Dad was an art dealer; Grandpa was a ditch digger for the city. I’ll be “retiring” on whatever I save between now and the day I can’t work anymore. Maybe some will be left for my son. And maybe – dare I dream it? – he’ll have savings of his own when he retires. Probably not, though. Certain lessons don’t seem to stay learned. VS
In Memory
My friend Bill Estes, general manager for Wisconsin Public Radio’s Milwaukee station, WHAD, 90.7 FM, passed away very suddenly on April 13. I’ll miss him terribly, as will his family and everyone at WPR, where he worked for 35 of his 57 years. We love you, Bill. Safe travels. jw
