by John de Graaf; David Wann; Thomas H Naylor; David Horsey; Vicki Robin
“We’ve mutated from citizens to consumers in the last sixty years,” says James Kuntsler, the author of The Geography of Nowhere. “The trouble with being consumers is that consumers have no duties or responsibilities or obligations to their fellow consumers. Citizens do. They have the obligation to care about their fellow citizens and about the integrity of the town’s environment and history.”2
Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam has devoted his career to the study of “social capital,” the connections among people that bind a community together. He observed that the quality of governance varies with the level of involvement in such things as voter turnout, newspaper readership, and membership in choral societies. Recently, he captured the public’s imagination by concluding that far too many Americans are “bowling alone”(compared to a generation ago, more people are bowling now, but fewer of them bowl in leagues). Once a nation of joiners, we’ve now become a nation of loners. Only about half of the nation’s voters typically vote in presidential elections. Only 13 percent reported attending public meetings on town or school affairs, and PTA participation has fallen from more than twelve million in 1964 to seven million in 1995. The League of Women Voters’ membership is down 42 percent since 1969, and fraternal organizations like the Elks and Lions are endangered species.3
Volunteering for Boy Scouts is off 26 percent since 1970, and for the Red Cross, 61 percent. Overall, a record 109 million Americans are volunteering, but many of them do it “on the run,” in shorter installments, so the total time volunteered has declined. The “fun factor” is a major stimulant in volunteering. If it’s not fun, forget it. A 1998 study on volunteering revealed that 30 percent of young adults volunteered because it was fun; 11 percent said they were committed to the cause.4
Putnam concedes that membership has expanded in newer organizations such as the Sierra Club and the American Association of Retired Persons. But most members never even meet, he points out—they just pay their dues and maybe read the organization’s newsletter. Internet chat groups, however convenient, are also faceless and fleshless. “Face-to-face connections are clearly more effective for building trust,” he says. “Knowing the person you’re talking to and taking personal responsibility for your view are crucial to having a conversation about public affairs.”5
THE CHAINING OF AMERICA
Another symptom of civic degeneration is the disappearance of traditional civic leaders of community organizations. Bank presidents and business owners with longstanding ties to the community are bounced from positions of community leadership when US Bank, Wal-Mart, Office Max, and Home Depot come to town to put them out of business. What do we get when the chains take over? Lower prices, cheaper stuff. But what we lose is the value of community—a nonmaterial value, but more important for a high quality of life. We lose the personal touch.
For example, small businesses give a higher percentage of their revenues to charitable organizations than the big, absentee franchises do, and they offer a lot more in terms of local character and product diversity. At a locally owned coffee shop, you might see artwork from someone who lives down the street. The shop is your coffee shop. At your independent bookseller, you stand a much greater chance of finding books from small presses who publish a wider variety of books than mainstream publishers.
The “chaining of America” has happened so quickly that it’s hard to believe the statistics. More than 40 percent of independent bookstores failed in the last decade. Barnes & Noble and Borders Books capture half of all bookstore sales.6 Lowe’s and Home Depot now control more than a third of the hardware market, forcing many a neighborhood “Mr. Fixit” to wear corporate apron colors—if he’s not “overqualified.”7 Eleven thousand independent pharmacies closed in the last decade, and chain drugstores now account for more than half of all pharmacy sales.8
It’s the same story in many other retail sectors, such as video rental outlets, grocery chains, and the restaurant industry. More than 4,100 independent video retailers have gone out of business since 1998, leaving Blockbuster and Hollywood Video in control of nearly half the market.9 Five firms account for 42 percent of all grocery sales, up from 24 percent in 1996,10 and more than 40 percent of restaurant spending is captured by the top one hundred chains.11 Even more alarming is the domination of single companies like Wal-Mart, which in 2003 controlled 7 percent of total U.S. retail spending. Wal-Mart imports 10 percent of all America’s total imports from China, and if it were a country, it would rank ahead of Great Britain and Russia in total imports.12
By using economies of scale in purchasing and distribution, and being able to stay in the market even at a loss, these monolithic retailers can drive out competition within a year, and in some cases sooner.13
In search of better buys and higher tax revenues, consumers and city council members typically first sacrifice Strip Avenue, then downtown, to the franchise developers, forgetting that much of a franchise dollar is electronically transferred to corporate headquarters, while a dollar spent at the local hardware stays put in towns or neighborhoods. The value of the local dollar is multiplied many times as small businesses hire architects, designers, woodworkers, sign makers, local accountants, insurance brokers, computer consultants, attorneys, advertising agencies—all services that the big retailers contract out nationally. Local retailers and distributors also carry a higher percentage of locally made goods than the chains, creating more jobs for local producers.14 When we buy from the chains, instead of a multiplier effect, we get a “divider effect.”
In 2005 our social defenses are down. Distracted by material things and out of touch with social health, we watch community life from the sidelines. Hurrying to work, we see a fleet of bulldozers leveling a familiar open area next to the river, but we haven’t heard yet what’s going in there. Chances are good it’s Wal-Mart, McDonald’s, and Starbucks.
AL NORMAN, SPRAWL BUSTER
“When I’m out of town,” says Al Norman, “I come home to as many as a hundred e-mail messages from all over the world. Concerned citizens are asking me for information on how to stop the huge retailers from rolling over their towns like an asphalt roller.” Norman spearheaded a Wal-Mart resistance campaign in his own hometown—Greenfield, Massachusetts—and won. After his story appeared in Time, Newsweek, the New York Times, and 60 Minutes, “My phone started ringing and hasn’t stopped,” he says. “I’ve been to thirty-six states now, teaching hometown activists what tools are available.”15
Norman’s Web site lists about 100 successes, some of which he has personally coached to victory, but he’s also very familiar with the defeats and the socioeconomic impacts that follow. “The Adirondack Daily Enterprise recently published an account of what has happened to retailers in Ticonderoga, New York, over the past eight months since Wal-Mart came to town,” he said. “Business is down at least 20 percent at the drugstore, jeweler, and auto parts stores, but the game’s totally over at the Great American Market, the town’s only downtown grocery store. First they cut their operating hours, then dropped the payroll from twenty-seven people to seventeen. This January, the grocery closed completely. Many of the people who shopped at the GAM were the elderly, low-income people without access to a car.”
“I’ve been here twenty-five years,” a downtown Sunoco station owner told Norman. “On the week before Christmas in prior years, you couldn’t find a parking space on this street. This year, you could have landed a plane on it.” Everyone’s car was parked at the megamall. Norman recalls going into Henniker, New Hampshire, a town actively opposing an 11,000-square-foot Rite-Aid store. “It did my heart good to read a sign at the city limits that, to me, said it all: Welcome to Henniker—the only Henniker on Earth. The problem is, you’ve got the other side of the American population. They’ll stand up in public meetings and insist they have a God-given right to cheap underwear and whipping cream. It seems like their sense of community is no bigger than their own shopping cart.”
FORTRESS AMERICA
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nbsp; What happens when affluenza causes communities to be pulled apart (for example, when a company leaves town and lays off hundreds of people), or crippled by bad design? We “cocoon,” retreating further and further inward and closing the gate behind us. Including secured apartment dwellers, residents of gated communities, prison inmates, and residential security system zealots, at least a fifth of the country now lives behind bars. “Socially, the house fortress represents a self-fulfilling prophecy,” says community designer Peter Calthorpe. “The more isolated people become and the less they share with others unlike themselves, the more they do have to fear.”16
Sociologist Edward Blakely would agree. “We are a society whose purported goal is to bring people of all income levels and races together, but gated communities are the direct opposite of that,” he writes in the book Fortress America. “How can the nation have a social contract without having social contact?”17 If gated enclaves are the final act of secession from the wider community and a retreat from the civic system, twenty thousand such communities, housing almost nine million people, have already seceded. Why have so many retreated from the wider community? Don’t we trust each other? In 1958, trust was sky high. Seventy-three percent of Americans surveyed said they trusted the federal government to do what is right either “most of the time” or “just about always.” Now only about half feel a strong sense of trust for the feds.
It’s the same with trust among individuals. As David Callahan documents in The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead, many are letting their personal ethics slide, whether it’s cheating the IRS, fudging the facts as a former New York Times reporter did, or injecting steroids, as many athletes have now confessed doing. Sixty percent of Americans now believe “you can’t be too careful in dealing with people.”18 It’s the same story in the workplace, where the lack of trust is costly. “When we can’t trust our employees or other market players,” writes Robert Putnam, “we end up squandering our wealth on surveillance equipment, compliance structures, insurance, legal services, and enforcement of government regulations.”19
If an eight-year-old girl can walk safely to the public library six blocks away, that’s one good indicator of a healthy community. For starters, you have a public library worth walking to and a sidewalk to walk on. But more important, you have neighbors who watch out for each other. You have social capital in the neighborhood— relationships, commitments, and networks that create an underlying sense of trust.
Yet in many American neighborhoods, trust is becoming a nostalgic memory. Seeing children at play is becoming as rare as sighting an endangered songbird. A 2000 nationwide poll conducted by the Pew School of Journalism reflected a collective queasiness in America. Compared to the 96 percent who felt safe in their homes, 20 percent did not feel safe in their own neighborhoods, and 30 percent did not feel safe at the mall. What do these results say about the world “out there”? Grab the takeout dinner, survive the commute, just get home. In the poll, a wide sampling of Americans was asked, “What do you think is the most important problem facing the community where you live?” Predictably, crime/violence scored the highest, but surprisingly, it shared top ranking with development/sprawl/traffic/roads. Both are problems that many Americans feel are out of control. And in an effort to regain control, we revert to the primal responses of fight or flight.
We try to fight crime with judicial and enforcement industries that have become 7 percent of the U.S. economy. In recent years we’ve expanded the number of men and women in police uniforms to control crime and hired three times as many “rent-a-cops” as real cops. And in prisons, taxpayers pick up the tab for costs per prisoner that are comparable to sending a student to Harvard.
In any densely populated area, you’ll hear the sounds of insecurity. Car alarms, beeping electronic locks, and police sirens reveal our futile quest to control crime. In reality, despite popular perceptions, living in suburbia may be statistically riskier than living in the inner city, because suburban residents drive three times as much as residents of close-in urban neighborhoods, and three times as many of them die in car crashes. Still, millions continue to take flight to the perceived security of suburbia.
THE SOCIAL COSTS OF PROSPERITY
Since 1950, the amount of land in our communities devoted to public uses— parks, civic buildings, schools, churches, and so on—decreased by a fifth, while the percentage of income we spend for house mortgages and rental payments increased from a fifth to a full half, according to the American Planning Association. The evidence shows that as we’ve disinvested in the public areas and “privatized” our lifestyles, we’ve often left citizenship and care at the front door. So many services are now delivered for a profit by the private sector, we seem to have just gotten out of the habit of taking care of each other.
The 1990s were the most continuously prosperous years in the history of America, as measured in economic terms. Yet Marc Miringoff at Fordham University’s Institute for Innovation in Social Policy believes that the trends in his Index of Social Health point to a nation in crisis.
“In 1977,” Miringoff says, “social health started its long decline, while the GDP continued upward. Since then, the social health index declined 45 percent while the GDP rose by 79 percent.”20
Far from being just abstract statistics, the trends he cites are about the real people, in your family and mine, who constitute the social wealth and vigor of our communities. More than three million children are reported abused every year—forty-seven cases for every 1,000 children. Miringoff asks, “What will be the impact on marriage, child rearing, education, and employment from all that abuse?” He also points to youth suicide as an unmistakable indicator of underlying discontent. In 1950, the suicide rate among youth aged fifteen to twenty-four was a relatively low 4.5 per 100,000. Today, it’s more than double that number. Each suicide resonates far beyond an individual’s family, causing serious depression among the victim’s friends, schoolmates, and neighbors—not to mention the lost potential of the youth.
A GEOGRAPHY OF NOWHERE?
When affluenza infects our communities, it starts a vicious cycle. We begin to choose things over people, a choice that disconnects us from community life and causes even more consumption and more disconnection. Health scientists have documented that people in relationships outlive single people, and that people who feel the friendship and support of neighbors need less health care. One study also found that residents of neighborhoods in crisis tend to be clinically “socially” depressed, with lower levels of serotonin—what antidepressants stimulate—in blood samples.
Have we become a nation too distracted to care? Like the medium-size fish that eat small fish, we consume franchise products in the privacy of our homes, then watch helplessly as the big-fish franchise companies bite huge chunks out of our public places, swallowing jobs, traditions, and open space. We assume that someone else is taking care of things—we pay them to take care of things so we can concentrate on working and spending. But to our horror, we discover that many of the service providers, merchandise retailers, and caretakers are not really taking care of us anymore. It might be more appropriate to say they’re consuming us.
CHAPTER 9
An ache
for meaning
Man does not live by cheap vacuum
cleaners alone.
—CONSERVATIVE ECONOMIST
WILHELM ROPKE
We are the hollow men.
We are the stuffed men.
—T.S. ELIOT
CINCINNATI —The blank, oppressive void facing the American consumer
populace remains unfilled despite the recent launch of the revolutionary
Swiffer dust-elimination system, sources reported Monday. The lightweight,
easy-to-use Swiffer is the 275,894,973rd amazing new product to fail to fill
the void—a vast, soul-crushing spiritual vacuum Americans of all ages face
on a daily basis, with nowhere to tur
n and no way to escape. . . . Despite high
hopes, the Swiffer has failed to imbue a sense of meaning and purpose in the lives of its users.
—FROM THE HUMOR NEWSPAPER, THE ONION
FEBRUARY9, 2000
The road switchbacks up, down, and around precipitous canyons, crosses raging streams, and winds by glassy lakes offering mirror images of an immense snow-covered volcano, the main attraction in Washington state’s Mount Rainier National Park. Each year, two million people drive the road. More than a few stop to admire the beautiful stone masonry, so perfectly in harmony with the natural setting, that forms the guardrails for the road and the graceful arches of its many bridges. This is high-quality work, built to last, built for beauty as well as utility. Built by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC).
In the 1930s, during the depths of the Great Depression, hundreds of young men came to Mount Rainier—ordinary, unemployed working men, mostly from cities back East. Living in tent camps or barracks, they built many of the marvelous facilities visitors to the park now take for granted. At a time when the dominant notion is that government never does anything well, the work of the CCC at Mount Rainier and many other national parks provides something of a corrective.
The men’s work was laborious, performed in snow, sleet, or blazing sun, and their wages barely provided subsistence. Their accommodations were anything but plush, and they had little to entertain them except storytelling and card games. Most could carry all the possessions they owned in a single suitcase. Yet when author Harry Boyte interviewed veterans of the CCC, he found that many looked back on those days as the best of their lives.