In the past six months, my family and I have watched two movies set in the Depression era: Cinderella Man and Sea Biscuit. Great movies, but the intense poverty portrayed in them unsettled my children.
After both movies, the kids asked all sorts of questions about the Depression and hardship, like “Why did Red [the horse-loving boy] have to leave his family to live with someone else?” I explained, “I’m guessing his parents put most of their money into the stock market, then lost it all when the market crashed.”
I then turned to my investment-aggressive wife and said, “That’s why I like to put money in other things, too, like bonds.” The kids anxiously inquired, “So we have enough money to stay in our house, even if the stock market crashes again?” I said, “Not forever, but we could buy a little time.”
I tried to comfort them, but without flat-out lying to them, my words couldn’t eliminate fears of poverty. They were a little scared and somber.
We live in an era of mass affluence. Not only do we have a remarkable number of millionaires and families with annual household incomes in excess of $100,000, but we have virtually no poor people in our country, in absolute terms. Lots of people are poor when compared to rich people or even middle-class people, but in absolute terms — the ability to acquire one’s basic sustenance — our country has no poor people that I know of. As Thomas Woods puts it in The Church and the Market:
Some 41 percent of our “poor” own their own homes, with another 75 percent owning automobiles and VCRs and two-thirds having air conditioning and microwave ovens. Virtually all own telephones, refrigerators, and television sets, all of which were once considered luxuries. The average poor person in America has more living space and is more likely to own a car and a dishwasher than the average European. Recalling that we live in a society in which among the poor obesity is a greater problem than malnourishment further helps to put the alleged poverty problem in the US into perspective.
I like our country’s affluence. I’m not the dour type who thinks everyone is going to hell because we’re too materialistic. I went through that stage in my twenties, but I mostly outgrew it.
But I do think all the affluence tends to skew our mental landscape. There’s a real risk that we stop thinking correctly when we lose sight of poverty. When we think everything will be big and rich forever and ever, with no need to save or be frugal or diligent, we will develop a mindset with some crucial mental furniture missing from it.
I think a quote from St. Vincent de Paul highlights this. He said, “If you consider the poor in the light of faith, then you will observe that they are taking the place of the Son of God Who chose to be poor.”
This quote ought to make us a little nervous. If St. Vincent is right, what does it mean for our rich country? If we have no poor (in absolute terms), where is the Son of God? Is He absent from our society? Does the absence of the poor give us a culture stripped of Christian values? Does the absence of poor people contribute to our infatuation with sex and fame?
I think it does. Because we are never confronted with real poverty, we walk around with a mental landscape just the opposite of my children’s after watching Cinderella Man and Sea Biscuit. Instead of scared and somber, as a culture we’re cocky and frivolous. We’re more likely to be envious that we’re not rich (because we see plenty of rich people) than grateful that we’re not poor. We want to emulate the rich instead of caring for others.
Without the poor, we lose a perspective that, the Bible and saints have repeatedly told us, is crucial to a proper understanding of existence.
Do I want to go back to the Depression? Not at all. Am I grateful for movies like Cinderella Man that remind me of it? Yes. Do I think that we, as a culture, somehow need to regain an appreciation for absolute poverty? Absolutely.
© Copyright 2006 Catholic Exchange
Eric Scheske is an attorney, the Editor of The Daily Eudemon, a Contributing Editor of Godspy, and the former editor of Gilbert Magazine.
