I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
My mother reused tea bags to brew three or four cups of tea. Even in her 90s, she liberated sugar packets from restaurants.
As a Depression kid, I, too, learned to pinch pennies. Later, in rebellion, I spent money like a drunken sailor. Now that I’m an ancient person looking backward, I see clearly that I’ve always bounced between cheap and wasteful, never achieving a rational perspective on money.
Why am I telling you this? Because this shock-and-awe meltdown and the prospect of a Second Great Depression is leading Americans to reassess their attitudes toward cash. I wonder how deep we will dig.
Let me go first. When I reach way down inside, I find -– egad! — I don’t respect money adequately. I wish I knew why; perhaps I got the idea in childhood that accumulating wealth was low behavior. That’s stupid.
Still, I prefer my error to what most Americans believe –- that money trumps other values, measures an individual’s worth and that America’s purpose is the pursuit thereof.
Oh, I’ve read the surveys and treatises on how religious we Americans are, but forget what people say. In action, we’re materialists, believers in money and things. Even when we practice what we preach — community, justice and love — it’s only after we make a buck. Our God (maybe everybody’s) is Mammon, our prophets range from Adam Smith to Alan Greenspan, and Donald Trump is a role model.
Richard Rohr put it neatly. The Franciscan priest who leads the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque’s South Valley once told me: “… whether Protestant, Catholic or Jew, our operative belief system is the American Dream — materialism, success, power and money.” (Column, Albuquerque Tribune, March 27, 2007).
In that context I ponder what wise folk are predicting. They say we’ll return to Depression-era virtues like saving and delayed gratification. Heck, Jim Cramer, the vulgar, frenetic host of CNBC’s “Mad Money,” recently told an audience that unfettered, unregulated free market capitalism is “done.”
That’s spinach. Irresponsible individualism may go out of fashion and the free market fantasy into hibernation, but memories of today’s debacle will fade, as did memories of the Great Depression.
Then the True Believers will ride again in pursuit of wealth. The experts will explain, again, how their individual lust for gold will — by the magic of the market — rain doubloons on all of us. And trusting in Mammon, we will put our faith in them again until… well, until we live this fearful moment again.
