Not So Bad News From Nowhere

I'm not usually one to find--or even seek--silver linings, but I keep seeing examples of positive outcomes from the recent troubles plaguing economies around the globe. It's much simpler, of course, to notice these locally, in the United States, whose population is far wealthier than many on other continents. And once again I do not mean to belittle or diminish the suffering of those who have lost jobs, income, homes, and livelihoods because of the recession.

However, it's impossible for me not to attend to some signs of useful change, especially when articles about shifting economic priorities are continuously being featured in the news, and not only on the front page of the daily rag's Business section or in the Economics And You portion of the op/ed pages. They're showing up everywhere: Front-page news about new kinds of jobs; articles in the Features pages about xeriscaping, organic gardens, city chickens, eating well at home on less, and wiser shopping; the Metro section's pieces on local green buildings, efforts at pollution control, and more healthful lunches in school cafeterias.

I admit that some of these might be more indicative of negative economic issues (less shopping means less income for merchants, and the possible failure of more businesses), but on the other side of the situation lies the possibility that we're exchanging our recent greed-based acquisitiveness for a more home-centered, frugal way of life (in both economic and environmental terms). This shift promises to generate new businesses that more responsibly serve local communities.

One ironic result is that bankruptcies of large franchised businesses might bring back the mom and pop stores, the small-business entrepreneurs that once served as the mainstay of communities but which have been all but eliminated by the rise of big supermarkets and dime stores--later, dollar stores. Cheap goods available at big boxes are attractive on tight budgets, but they rarely reflect a community's values or address their real needs. Perhaps in a sliding global economy the old post office-general store-pub/cafe culture might again knit villages and small towns together into viable decentralized economies.

I'm not terribly sanguine about this prospect--because all the talk about new energy sources seems to focus on huge systems of power transfer across immense grids--but I can dream. My utopian bones are vibrating to the tune of possibility. What if, for example, somebody could design local energy systems fueled by wind and sun, and every member of the community could contribute to a local collection/distribution grid? Instead of sending all of McKinney's coal/nuke/wind-generated energy into a regional MegaPower company (in north Texas that's OnCor, even though Beloved Spouse and I buy our power from Green Mountain), we could create our own with home- and business-based systems of wind and solar collectors.

Instead of massive powerlines carrying electricity hither and yon, we could make and use our own, and send the excess into a locally centralized storage system (that would require fewer lines, most of them underground, perhaps) for distribution among members of a local co-op.

While I'm fantasizing, how about a taxpayer-supported (i.e. shared) system of garden allotments within city limits, in vacant lots of failed big-box stores, where mini-produce farms and "farmers" could grow what they want to eat, and share the surplus with one another and needy families. Children could be taught the principles of organic gardening as part of school curricula, and even perhaps get their hands dirty with a bit of weeding and harvesting.

I have never really understood why "civilized" folks seem to measure their success by how many of their needs are supplied by other people: the ones who collect our garbage, service our sewer systems, take care of and educate our children, clean our homes, cook our meals, make our clothing, etc. "Successful" Americans buy huge suburban houses with environmentally absurd expanses of lawn, and then hire labor forces to cut the grass and deposit the clippings onto city streets with noisy, air-polluting leaf-blowers. Then we complain about paying the taxes that allow the city itself to hire people to clean the streets. But the economic downturn shows some promise of stimulating a bit more self-reliance among local citizens.

What I'm noticing in the papers and in news sources online is an increasing number of stories about people who are learning to do more for themselves, or at least to channel their cash into projects that help communities rather than focus primarily on their own little plot of land. In some cases, the stories are about wealthy folks out there doing the right thing with their big yards--turning them into more natural or at least environmentally sensible landscapes, or even into appropriate gardens. Even if these folks are doing so to save money on increasingly high water bills, the motive doesn't negate the beneficial effects of their actions.

Neighborhoods of suburban moms who have been a bit reluctant to shell out cash for high-dollar summer camps are sharing expertise among their children, providing mini-camps that teach kids how to garden, sew, and cook. Cash-strapped families are staying in town, or at least close to home and taking advantage of local museums and arts venues. If families keep this up, we might generate both brighter kids and closer-knit communities.

Some of the high-dollar government incentives to stimulate the economy seem to be working, and some show real promise: Cash for Clunkers, tax rebates for first-time home buyers, and the up-coming energy-efficient appliance rebates. But real economic change should include plans to promote green energy development and support the companies that use and supply the new technologies with low-cost educational loans or programs to train people to operate them, like the one now being promoted by the President. Changing technologies means changing jobs--but it doesn't have to mean a net loss in total jobs. It's undoubtedly difficult to switch career paths and undertake new training, but it might actually be more rewarding to work for a company that won't be poisoning your grandchildren's air and water supply.

I'm perfectly aware that for every one of these "good news" articles, there are probably twenty that chronicle the bad news. But for years I found far fewer indications that we might finally be getting things right, even though I was looking for them. I started this blog in part to help me understand what was happening to my planet, by remembering what it was like, thinking about possible solutions to multiple ills, and noting what we had lost before we lost it forever.

These days I hear a lot of talk about wanting "my America" back--but I think the folks who're chanting this slogan in opposition to the present administration's attempts to help us recover from recession are failing to realize that many of us have been wanting "our America" back for a long time. And we finally seem to be succeeding. A very little bit at a time.

Putting the Recess Back In Recession

Before I begin musing once again about interesting (to me, at least) linguistic phenomena, let me preface my remarks by noting that I am fully aware that the recession has hurt many people, and these may not find much of a silver lining in the current economic situation. The President himself has recently noted that while Americans are losing jobs, the recovery--however promising it might look to some of us--has a long way to go.

That said, I did want to mention some of the more positive events that have been collecting in my pile of tear-sheets from the newspaper, and to muddle around in yet another etymological connection.

We probably all remember that blessed moment in elementary school every day (sometimes twice) called "recess," when we'd all pour out of doors happily to escape our educational imprisonment for twenty minutes of running around screaming, playing on the monkey bars, playing four-square, or jump-rope, or trying to elude the reigning bully. It occurs to me now that all my memories of "recess" are drawn from the single year I spent in a U. S. school, between my father's stints in Japan and Taiwan. All my schooling before and after that occurred in Asia, until I returned home permanently to begin high school--and I don't really remember "recess" as part of my experience overseas.

The only other "recess" story I have involves my son, and the first pre-school he attended at about 4 and a half. Since he could already read, I let the administrators place him in a reading program meant to encourage and build on existing abilities. But when I picked him up after his first day, he announced in no uncertain terms that he hated reading. Oops! It turns out that the school's special program involved keeping kids in from recess to read instead of going out to play.

Now, I don't know whose lame-ass idea that was, but I yanked that kid out that school the very next day, and eventually found a Montessori school out in the country, which turned out to be about the best thing that ever happened to either of my children (my daughter started there at 18 months, at her own insistence). Recess to children in this country is sacrosanct, so if you want to, say, break them from smoking or drinking, insist that they stay in for recess to do it, and the problem is licked.

All silly jokes aside, "recess" was once a good thing. But because it comes from the same root as the dreaded word "recession," I thought that playing around with the innate concepts involved in that root might be illuminating, and suggest reasons for some of the more positive views of the current economic moment that are starting to emerge.

The noun, recess, according to the OED, refers to "the act of retiring for a time from some occupation; a period of cessation from usual work or employment," or "cessation from work, relaxation, leisure." It comes from the Latin resessus (from the verb recidere, to recede, draw back, retire, retreat) which means a going back, a receding, a retreat--or even a place of retreat. The thing about words that always confuses us, however, is that they frequently connote both positive and negative aspects of the same concept. So, while recess to a kid is replete with ideas of fun and games, that's hardly what recession implies in economic terms.

However, I have been noticing an increasing number of efforts to put a positive spin on current conditions. I'm thinking in particular of a photo in the Dallas Morning News a few weeks ago (I can't even hope to find it now) of a guy sitting on his back patio reading the paper, simply because he had started to slow down. His family is eating meals together on a regular basis these days, because they're becoming more conscious of how much money they spend, and aren't eating out as much. Instead of running out to breakfast and shopping afterward, he was relaxing in his back yard on a pleasant Saturday morning.

Another recent article from the local rag (pinched from the New York Times) by Pico Iyer carried the headline, "The Joy of Less." It was originally posted on the Times's new "Happy Days" blog, which carries this description:

The severe economic downturn has forced many people to reassess their values and the ways they act on them in their daily lives. For some, the pursuit of happiness, sanity, or even survival, has been transformed. Happy Days is a discussion about the search for contentment in its many forms — economic, emotional, physical, spiritual — and the stories of those striving to come to terms with the lives they lead.

Pico Iyer's contribution describes his own, rather spare, life in the outskirts of Kyoto (which I find enviable, to say the least, based on my remote memories of the Japanese countryside, and the simplicity of our life in rural Japan). He notes, however that it's not for everybody:

I certainly wouldn’t recommend my life to most people — and my heart goes out to those who have recently been condemned to a simplicity they never needed or wanted. But I’m not sure how much outward details or accomplishments ever really make us happy deep down. The millionaires I know seem desperate to become multimillionaires, and spend more time with their lawyers and their bankers than with their friends (whose motivations they are no longer sure of). And I remember how, in the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which meant that, like Zeno’s arrow, I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied.

In the papers every week I see evidence that the economic downturn carries, at least in some sense, a positive aspect, and perhaps an optimistic note or two. The local kerfuffle (I do so love this word, and Rachel Maddow didn't use it even once this week, so I will) over city chickens (whether or not they can be sold in Dallas garden shops is the Big Topic lately), the increasing number of backyard and front-yard veggie and herb gardens, the resurgence of various nesting behaviors (among people as well as chickens), the formations of more-or-less accidental communities of like-minded folk: all of these stories and events provide a little hope that we've managed to muster a bit of can-do spirit to replace some of the whining we used to do about how bad things were.

My cranky little newly-repaired heart was warmed this week by a conversation with my daughter, who lives in a converted industrial building in one of the legendary neighborhoods of Dallas: Deep Ellum (or "way down on Elm street"). Although it's being gentrified by rehabbing, a new DartRail station, and new construction, it's still a bit seedy and if I hadn't already planted myself here in the northern 'burbs, I would seriously consider moving there. Her fellow loft-dwellers are a generally friendly lot, and several of the neighbors have gotten together to form a sort of Sunday supper club. My daughter loves to cook, but seldom does because she lives alone (with a Very Large Dog who can't eat people food) and it's not worth the trouble after a long workday. She and the neighbors and their dogs now pool their resources and have become a little family of folks who enjoy one another's company on a regular basis.

I don't mean to sentimentalize the situation, but the economy we knew was completely unsustainable. People were making and buying way too much crap, spending way too much money, and incurring consequent debt. Having to cut back doesn't have to mean establishing a lower standard of living. Different, certainly, but perhaps actually higher, in terms of contentment, happiness, or whatever we want to call the psychological well-being that comes with shedding some of our stressful behaviors and reassessing our values.

The Times is also running a segment in its Economy section called Living With Less: The Human Side of the Global Recession. The conversations attending this coverage and the Happy Days Blog are interesting and informative, so I highly recommend both to anybody who wants to tune in to this aspect of the debate on recession and recovery, and who might want to be thinking about this whole thing as an adult form of recess.

Image credit: Hammock in a Beach House by Raven712 at Wikimedia Commons. In my advancing stage of old-guyness, a hammock is a necessary requirement for recess, even though I don't yet own one.