Wake up!

The President, in his State of the Union address sympathized with the country by bemoaning the “longer hours for less pay” that Americans are working.

We have been spoiled.

Most of the rest of the world has been laboring under depressed wages that barely sustain and in some cases are not enough to do even that. We should not be surprised that a just leveling factor has started to impose itself. We had been immune for so long because we had the luxury of not living in a global economy. We could suck in imports at reduced prices and export goods made at our wage levels.

Now the world is not only our market but also our competitor in wages. We started to see the impact a several decades ago when it was noted how many many more hours per day and days per year Americans worked than other developed countries. Those additional hours were the trade off to enable our goods to be sold overseas at competitive prices while we enjoyed higher wages. Then we started to see a slowdown in wage increases. Then, when the current repression hit, companies took the opportunity to adjust.

In my own company, I first saw pension cut-backs, then cuts on vacations, then withheld bonuses, then lay-offs, then transfers of jobs to overseas divisions where wages were lower and most recently, wage cuts -- all within a year and a half. In addition, more and more expenses are being pushed out to the employees. The very prevalence of telecommuting is turning each employee in my company into a quasi-independent contractor bearing his or her own costs and bargaining for their jobs.

Who do we think we are bargaining against except the world? We are not quite yet waking up. The world is willing to work at much cheaper wages because they live at much lower standards than we Americans. I get tired of hearing the public and our politicians (Republican and Democrat alike) rail against the sending of jobs overseas and against the lowering of wages and the standard of living.

Until we are willing to pay for what we consume our standard of living SHOULD decrease. We have been living at the expense of the rest of the world and cry at our misfortune of seeing our standard of living now decrease. We have decried the sweat shops and child labor and deforestation of tropical rainforests but we don’t want those areas to compete on a level playing field for our jobs.

It’s time to wake up! Our standard of living is neither a right nor necessary. It is certainly not moral to defend. Our country is great because of our hard work, willingness to compete and generosity. We need to start buckling down and, if necessary, throw out the luxuries until the rest of the world can catch up. Are we afraid to compete for a fair wage?

Culture

I commented recently that Twitter, Facebook, and other internet applications are the new unifying media in a time when television is becoming more fractionalized. I called these applications culture, noting that they give us “a much thicker commonality” than television ever did. I think, though, that my characterizing FaceBook as “culture” struck some as profane. Alongside the great arts of poetry, painting, music and architecture how could anyone consider the crass exchange of cyber-cocktails, digital Easter eggs and viral bra colors to be culture?

I do. Culture is that which binds us. It is our shared reference points. It is our currency for communication. I think of an immigrant new to our language struggling with idioms. She would not have a chance of knowing what, for example, a phrase like “pooh-pooh” signifies. In contrast, anyone raised in America (at least in my generation) knows that a person “pooh-poohing” something is “sneering at” it. We know what it means because we swim in that same culture.

Or consider this crossword clue I encountered last week. The clue was for “grant with grammys.” The answer was a three-letter word that turned out to be “amy,” which I recognized because I live in an American community that shares a common knowledge that Amy Grant is a grammy award-winning country singer and that a “grammy” is a an award, not someone’s elderly relative.

Those common reference points are becoming much more numerous and pervasive with the spread of the internet and of social networks in particular. They are creating a “thicker commonality” where more people share the same knowledge. A few years ago most of us might have shared an interesting newspaper article with a friend at lunch where, now, we share it with dozens or hundreds online and many of them share it again. Sure, much of what is shared electronically these days is inane but so was the TV content of past years that is now our common touchstone. Much of that TV content, that which was of the least interest, that which did not go “viral” in our national conversation, has slipped from sight but those references that spread and were shared, like those to Captain Kangaroo and Howdy Dowdy, persist. We recognize, for instance, a reference to Mr. Rogers changing his shoes when he comes in the door. We know the meaning of “Danger Will Robinson! Danger!” or “Beam me up, Scotty.” And, fear not, you protectors of high culture, many of these, too, will be culled out of culture as memory fades but they are, nonetheless, culture, now.

In the same way, even though Twitter and FaceBook have a very low threshold for quality, how can we help but be part of a world who now knows who some Scottish matron named Susan Boyle is? The internet for better or worse has brought us a common language that did not exist a few years ago? For better or worse, we somehow know what is meant if someone says “BTW, IMHO, that’s TMI, biotch.” Hopefully these are examples of culture that will fade but they ARE culture.

Culture is the touchstone of commonality wherever humans congregate, whether it is crass or refined. Mozart was thought to be crass in his time. Many of Shakespeare’s references are bawdy and profane. Who knows? The future may look back with reverence on our graffiti taggers and, in the mean time, we all can share a common culture that is shrinking our world and our differences. Time will shake out the trivial and leave the great works for generations to come.

Faithless

Have you ever come up short, surprised by how people see you or, maybe more to the point, how they don’t see you?

I am a person whose faith has become stronger and stronger over the decades. I see myself that way. I was an ardent and whole-hearted Baptist, convinced of the truth that God, whose attention went to the smallest sparrow, was also intent on me. I was convinced of my sinfulness and God’s willingness to sacrifice himself out of love to reconcile the gap between me and him. I accepted that grace. The wonder of it made me laugh in joy. My faith made me want to hone my life to truth and whittle away falsehoods and inconsistencies.

I studied and taught the Bible and surrounded myself with a fellowship of like believers but I also questioned and prodded to refine what I believed was true. Over the years my faith has become more solid and my joy and wonder deeper. But, in the process, the object of my faith has been gradually but profoundly adjusted. The object of my faith has changed to something more solid, to something material and yet so much more expansive than it was decades ago. So, I see myself as being true to my beliefs. I see myself as a believer, a person of a hard-to-come-by faith that has been honed and tempered. I know what I believe and why.

What brings me up short is that others see me as a nonbeliever and as one who has lost her faith. Even some friends who have known me for years are blind to how important my faith is to me. They seem to think that, if I no longer believe as they do, I must believe nothing. Where they would be respectful if they thought they were addressing someone of a different faith, with me they do not even recognize the need for respect. I feel invisible at those times. When I am invisible to those I thought knew me, it hurts. It feels like a betrayal of faith.