Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic
Page 26
Co-housing emphasizes design for community: high density and lots of common space when possible. Many visioning sessions made even a slow-moving process exciting. In one brainstorming session, architect Matt Worswick (who’s now a resident) led the group through a process of imagining what activities would be done, where. The group imagined the pedestrian walkways, the community garden, the kids’ playgrounds, and various rooms in the common house. Since the architecture is southwestern, they pictured a mission bell in a bell tower. And ten years later, that imaginary bell has a very real clang; kids love to be asked to pull the rope that rings it. Salvaged from an old farm where one of the members grew up, the massive bell calls everyone in the community (called Harmony Village) for meals, meetings, and celebrations.
By clustering homes in blocks of two and four, Harmony residents preserved both land and energy, since heat is “borrowed” from the walls of neighboring homes. And by mandating that cars be parked in garages and parking spaces at the edge of the neighborhood, the group preserved the sanity of its members. There’s a sense of calmness in the center of the neighborhood, kind of like a courtyard in a college campus. The design also helps the neighborhood’s security, because there’s usually activity in the common area, and there’s also a good chance of having “eyes on the green” as people make dinner or do the dishes.
When Dave began to incrementally invest in the future of that neighborhood, he was also investing in his new neighbors. Instead of now wondering who lives six houses down, neighbors all got to know each other very well before moving in, because they had met regularly with each other for two and a half years before a single foundation was dug. In the process of building the physical community, they also laid social foundations. They became citizens by necessity, because once the neighborhood was built, it had to be governed. Each resident serves on a team, and once a month, a large gathering is held to take care of community business, work collectively on maintenance or building projects, or just have a big party or dance.
The neighborhood that emerged is a diverse band of individuals, ranging in age from one year to eighty-three. Just about everybody has been profiled in the neighborhood newsletter, also an open forum for ideas, creative writing, and true confessions. Rich Grange is an entrepreneur whose telecommunications business provides local jobs for many of his neighbors. The company is committed to social activism, offering time off with pay for employees who volunteer. Edee Gail is a musician and community activist who helped “Save the Mesa"—a landmark seen from the community green. Recently, she was singing a song in an assisted-living center. An elderly woman walked away from the group and, according to a nurse who was there, died singing the song.
The community lost a good neighbor and role model when Ginny Mackey, a retired minister, died. Throughout her later years, the topic of “restorative justice” was a passion; this approach seeks genuine healing by creating a one-to-one dialogue between criminal and victim.
Virginia Moran is an expert on environmentally and socially responsible investing. Her expertise developed as she researched corporate involvement during the Vietnam war. “It was to their benefit to keep the war going,” she says, recalling her initial research. “I decided to teach myself so I could help people align their investments with their values. Then I happened to be in San Francisco and attended some of the early meetings of the Social Investment Forum. After Desmond Tutu came to the United States asking investors to withdraw financial support for South African apartheid, we began canvassing specific sectors, asking them to participate in that cause. Churches were especially effective in getting the word out. Five years later, the [South African] economy started to falter, partly as a result of our efforts.”8
Moran has personal investments in diversified hardwood tree plantations in Costa Rica, and in small loans to micro-enterprises, which she calls “bootstraps banking.” You can see her excitement as she explains how well some of the funds she works with are performing. “There are now more than fifty mutual funds that apply social and environmental criteria to their portfolios, and many receive higher ratings than their unscreened counterparts. Not one of the SR funds has been involved in the trading scandals that have tarnished the reputations of many of the better-known funds,” she says.
“Some of the reasons the SR funds provide superior financial returns is that the companies they represent don’t experience the problems associated with waste and pollution. They don’t pay huge EPA fines,” she explains. “They are good citizens of the communities where their plants are located, and they provide a safe, healthy environment for their workers. Their fair hiring practices attract quality employees resulting in high productivity. Their CEOs don’t receive excessive compensation. Eventually all of this shows up on the bottom line.”
These are just a few of the residents of Harmony Village, and most of the others are also involved with activities that stretch the conventional meaning of the word value. The way they spend their time makes money less critical. Save enough for retirement? Sure. But do they need a new car, to keep up with the Joneses? Not really, because the Joneses drive a well-maintained Saab old enough to wear plates that label the car an antique.
The neighborhood’s mission statement is To create a cooperative neighborhood of diverse individuals sharing human resources within an ecologically responsible community setting. To make good on that mouthful of intentions, the group recycles, composts, cultivates a community garden, and works on local issues like battling the last leg of a metro beltway. Like the rest of the country, Harmony residents are victims of an economy that doesn’t always “get it.” Recently, they caught employees of the recycling company red-handed—mixing carefully sorted materials together with trash bound for the landfill.
The group also experiments with more innovative activities, like community-supported agriculture. Since their own garden is still evolving, many in the neighborhood subscribe to a produce service from a local farmer who delivers eight or ten bushel baskets of produce to the neighborhood every week. This enables J. P., the farmer, to know at the beginning of the growing season how much to plant. (“So who’s got a great coleslaw recipe?”)
Another concept being actively discussed is an effective, businesslike car-sharing cooperative. As Worldwatch Institute writer Gary Gardner phrases it, “Cars spend most of their lives (an average of 95%) parked, taking up space, not taking people where they want to go —not doing what they were built to do.”9 In an era with high percentages of at-home workers and retired people, and a desperate need for the reemergence of public transportation, some Harmony residents wonder why we can’t get around in fewer cars, which would use less land for parking spaces and roads and gobble smaller bites of income for car insurance.
The neighborhood already has an informal network of car lending, and a very supportive approach to transportation. “When you need to pick your car up from the shop, just walk around the neighborhood and see who’s around,” says Laura Herrera, a renter in the community. One Sunday morning at 4:20 a.m., Dave got a frantic call from a neighbor who was trying to board a plane to go on vacation, but whose ID had expired. “Do you think you could go into my house, get my work ID, and be out here at the airport in less than forty-seven minutes, when the plane leaves?” he asked, hopefully. Since there was no traffic, Dave made it in thirty-six minutes.
Though the residents don’t call their neighborhood utopia, they’re learning trial-by-fire citizenship—an exciting and challenging, if sometimes frustrating, proposition. Co-housing is only one of many ways to create vital, people-friendly neighborhoods, and it doesn’t have to take place in newly constructed buildings. (The Nomad community in Boulder, Colorado, for example, shares public space with an existing theater, while the On-Going Community in Portland, Oregon, rehabilitated old neighborhood houses that members were able to purchase cheaply.) Whenever developers, city leaders, and active citizens successfully create a place that optimizes social opportunities and minimizes wasted effor
t (including resources, time, and money), they are taking a swipe at affluenza.
RESPONSIBLE WEALTH
As we’ve seen throughout this section of the book, many Americans’ economic values may be changing—perhaps just in time. Another indication comes from a seemingly unlikely place—the ranks of the rich and famous. The phrase “a roomful of millionaires” may bring to mind high-powered, aggressive deals struck behind closed doors, but if it’s a meeting of an organization known as Responsible Wealth, the millionaires may be plotting to give money away.
More than four hundred of its members have already redistributed millions in profits they could have reaped from a recent law cutting capital gains taxes. They also opposed recent efforts to abolish the estate tax, a tax that affects only people like them. Says one of the group’s founders, Mike Lapham, “It’s not in society’s long-term interest to have people at the top living in gated communities while people at the bottom are behind bars or living in poverty.” Among the members of Responsible Wealth are the singer Cher and the actress Christine Lahti.
Another member, software millionaire Michele McGeoy, says, “If I’m earning money watching my stocks grow and someone else is working hard as a teacher, why should I pay a lower tax rate? That may be good for me economically, but it doesn’t build a healthy society.”10
What’s up with these people? Why don’t they get over it, rake in the money, and get back to the mergers and takeovers? Apparently because they’ve reached a point of having “enough.” Now, greater satisfaction comes from acting for the common good. In a sense, they are reinvesting the money—not just for profit, but for people.
CHAPTER 27
Vaccinations and Vitamins
People who for years have been fighting the pollution
of the physical environment suddenly realize
that we have a perhaps even bigger problem that
has to be solved first, and that is cleaning up the toxic
areas of our mental environment.
—KALLE LASN,
Adbusters
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, or so the old saying goes. Many of us take that suggestion seriously each fall when we line up dutifully for flu shots. When we feel a virus coming on, we pop vitamin C tablets into our mouths, hoping Linus Pauling knew what he was talking about. Of course, there are no real shots or pills that can prevent or soften the impact of affluenza (with one exception: for the small percentage of Americans who are truly addicted, the compulsive shoppers, psychiatrists sometimes prescribe anti-compulsion drugs and antidepressants, with promising results). But in a metaphorical sense, some powerful antiviruses are floating around that can help vaccinate us against affluenza, and so are some equally effective vitamins that can help keep us from harm’s way.
ADBUSTERS
During the 2004-05 flu season, when the United States discovered it was desperately short of influenza vaccine, thousands of Americans traveled north of the border to get their shots. The Victoria Clipper, a ferry offering service between Seattle and Victoria, British Columbia, even offered package deals whereby people could buy a round-trip on the boat and get vaccinated upon landing in Canada. Hundreds of senior citizens braved stormy weather and seasickness for the privilege. It was a little egg on the face for those American politicians who mocked the Canadian health care system, eh?
But the Canadians are also leading the way in vaccinating for affluenza. Vancouver, British Columbia, might be called the headquarters of anti-affluenza vaccine research. It’s the home of Kalle Lasn, the author of Culture Jam and director of the Media Foundation, publishers of a magazine called Adbusters. The magazine (which seems to have lost its sense of humor lately and has become grim, shrill, and rhetorical) became popular with its clever “uncommercials,” anti-ads that often mock real ads. For example, a parody of Calvin Klein’s “Obsession” ads shows men staring into their underwear, while another mocking Absolut Vodka shows a partially melted plastic vodka bottle, with the caption “Absolute Impotence” and a warning in small print that “drink increases the desire but lessens the performance.”
John’s favorite ad mocks no real product but shows a handsome young businessman who says he’s one of many who are turning to “Mammon,” because “I want a religion that doesn’t complicate my life with unreasonable ethical demands.” It’s an obvious play on Christ’s declaration that “you cannot serve both God and Mammon.” “We’re not the biggest player in the spiritual arena, but we’re the fastest growing,” the Mammon anti-ad declares. It’s a subtle but powerful reminder of the decline of true spirituality in the Age of Affluenza.
Perhaps the most successful of Adbusters’ parodies were its anti-smoking ads. In one of them, two Marlboro Man-type cowboys ride side by side in the sunset. “I miss my lung, Bob,” reads the caption. A series of anti-ads mocks Joe Camel, a cartoon character devised to sell cigarettes to kids, according to anti-smoking critics. Joe Camel becomes “Joe Chemo,” a camel dying of cancer, lying in a hospital bed hooked to an array of life-support equipment, or already dead from cancer and lying in his coffin. In Seattle, the city’s public health department paid to put Joe Chemo on outdoor billboards.
TURNING ADVERTISING AGAINST ITSELF
The anti-ads work like vaccines because they use the virus itself to build up resistance. “We discovered early on in the publication of Adbusters that if we come up with an ad that looks like a Chevron ad or a Calvin Klein ad and fool people for a couple of seconds before they realize it’s saying exactly the opposite, then we have created a kind of moment of truth that forces them to think about what they’ve seen,” says Lasn.1
Born during World War II in Estonia, Lasn spent the early years of his life in a refugee camp. He remembers that period as tough in a material sense, “but it was a time when our family was very together, when the community in which we lived was very together, and I recall it with fondness.” Lasn moved around a lot, from Germany to Australia to Japan, where he worked for ten years in marketing until he had a sudden change of heart. He emigrated to Vancouver and became a documentary filmmaker. In 1989 Lasn produced his first television “uncommercial,” a parody of British Columbia Tourist Commission ads that showcased the province’s stunning natural beauty. Lasn’s spoof showed what was happening to that beauty as logging companies clear-cut B.C.’s ancient forests. Not surprisingly, television stations refused to air the uncommercial even though Lasn was willing to pay for the airtime.
Lasn still hopes to get uncommercials on commercial television, which he calls “the command center of our consumer culture.” Lasn and his co-workers, most of whom are less than half his age, have produced dozens of TV uncommercials. One trumpets “the end of the age of the automobile,” as a metal dinosaur constructed from model cars topples to the ground. Others promote “TV Turnoff Week,” challenge the “beauty” industry for promoting anorexia and bulimia, and depict a bull running through a china shop while criticizing the gross national product as a measure of economic health.
Many of the uncommercials are produced by people who actually work in the advertising industry. “They have qualms about the ethics of their business,” says Lasn, “so clandestinely they come and help us to come up with our messages, which are trying to use television to change the world for the better.”
NO ROOM IN THE BOX
But Lasn admits he’s still had virtually no success in getting those messages on television. He says, “All the major networks in North America have rejected just about all of our television uncommercials.” He describes a discussion with an executive at CNN. It came when Lasn wanted to buy time for one of his anti-beauty industry ads during a CNN fashion show.
“Listen, personally I like your campaign,” the executive told Lasn. “I think it says something very important about our society. We should be airing spots like this, but on an official level I can tell you right now, we will never air that spot because we would have Revlon and Maybelline and Calvin Klein coming dow
n our throats the very next day, and that’s where our bread and butter is.”
Lasn continues to challenge the rejections in court, but the courts nearly always rule that his ads are political commercials and the only political commercials networks must accept are those for candidates in election campaigns. So much for free speech and First Amendment protections. “We need a free marketplace of ideas instead of a closed shop where only consumption messages are allowed,” Lasn says with a touch of anger. “This is really a battle for the right to communicate. I think it’s one of the really great human rights battles of our information age.”
BUY NOTHING DAY
CNN did agree (alone among the networks) to air one of Lasn’s uncommercials, a spot showing a pig protruding from a map of North America. After a short narration: “The average North American consumes five times more than a Mexican, ten times more than a Chinese person, and thirty times more than a person from India. We are the most voracious consumers in the world,” the pig burps loudly. “Give it a rest,” the narrator continues. The spot promotes an annual event called “Buy Nothing Day,” held on the Friday after Thanksgiving, which, in the United States, kicks off the Christmas shopping season.
Begun in Vancouver in 1992, Buy Nothing Day is now celebrated in many other countries. Participants agree not to purchase anything that day, cut up their credit cards, and demonstrate to encourage others to follow suit. In Vancouver, just before Buy Nothing Day, teams of young adbusters race through the streets ahead of the police, slapping hard-to-remove Buy Nothing Day posters on store windows.