Work

More Signs We Are Not Ready

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I was stumbling around looking for an article on the Web and found this courageous piece in Chronicles Magazine entitled America's Descent Into the Third World. Paul Craig Roberts dismantles recently created jobs and finds that the upbeat economic news we hear of late resembles the Emperor's latest threads. This article is must-read for those of you who read through my series on the business world.

I wonder from time to time if our economic leaders are flat-out lying to us to keep us from panicking. Honestly. Alan Greenspan recently let it be known that he has no idea why the economy is acting the way it is. If he doesn't understand what is going on, then no one does. That's never a positive sign.

The spin our economy is getting is bizarre, too. The Wall Street Journal yesterday was trumpeting the roaring economy noting that Americans are spending more again and that GM and Ford's sales are up more than 40% over last year. But in the same edition in different articles, they also note that Americans are now saving nothing. Nada. Everything we make goes out. And the numbers behind GM and Ford? Well, they are effectively selling almost all of their cars at a loss, unable to cover their expenses. That's not a great business plan.

When you start unpacking all the "good" economic and business news, you find the kinds of statistics that Paul Craig Roberts did:

[In the June 2005 jobs report, only] 144,000 private sector jobs were created, each one of which was in domestic services.

Fifty-six thousand jobs were created in professional and business services, about half of which are in administrative and waste services.

Thirty-eight thousand jobs were created in education and health services, almost all of which are in health care and social assistance.

Nineteen thousand jobs were created in leisure and hospitality, almost all of which are waitresses and bartenders.

Membership associations and organizations created 10,000 jobs, and repair and maintenance created 4,000 jobs.

Financial activities created 16,000 jobs.

This most certainly is not the labor market profile of a First World country, much less a superpower.

We are fast becoming a country of waiters, secretaries, and janitors. This is not to say that these jobs are not needed, Your mop & bucket are ready...but only that they cannot sustain America. Roberts's later comments on white collar work are especially telling. Again, read the whole article (even if you've heard the same warnings from me already.)

The American Church's silence on this is becoming pathological. If we cannot speak to the business world, if we cannot prepare for bad times, if we cannot shout truth in the face of lies, if we cannot bring hope to those who continue to slide downward, if we cannot bring peace to the frantic, then are we really bringing anything redemptive to anyone's work life?

Just this week the guys from my small group were discussing the fact that we are all harried, stressed out, torn in a million directions, estranged time-wise from our families, and working harder than ever for less. Each man had a complaint that was different from the rest, but we were all united in the fact that our problems here went back to the same single issue that the Church in America refuses to discuss. Something has to give.

I'll leave it to readers to imagine what's next. Are we ready for it?

Isolationism, Materialism, and the Evils of Our Age

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Just a monkey in a cageIt doesn’t take a genius to see that something is drastically wrong at the very heart of our daily living. After reading Brad over at The Broken Messenger blogging about the American Dream and how it is destroying us through our materialism and outright stinginess toward tithing, I have to wonder if the cure we Christians are offering is just a Band-Aid pasted over something gangrenous.

Though I want to charge ahead in this post, let’s first consider Brad’s lament:

We blend the definitions between “need” and “desire” such that they are indistinguishable so that we can justify not giving to the Body of Christ our time and or money; yet somehow we find the means to set aside regular portions of our wages and time in our lives for our dreams – all with the expectation that once the allotted time has passed, we will reap the rewards for our patience and self sacrifices. But in the same manner that we pursue our earthly dreams, Jesus has asks us to abandon them along with everything else. He asks that we sacrifice all for a little while, for inconceivable and imperishable riches later.

With all respect to Brad, there is a far deeper problem here. Not only do we suffer from the very things Brad so rightly accuses, but we cannot NOT suffer from them because of the way we’ve setup our societal structures.

I’ve blogged about this many times before, most recently in part in my business series, but it bears repeating. I own a large farm tractor. I bought it when we moved to our property with the idea of having a small farm. All my neighbors own farm tractors, too, in various sizes, capabilities, and vintages. There are five families that live on about sixty acres of land. We all have need for a tractor, but do each of us have to have one that is strictly ours?

With our island mentality of existence, each man must have his own self-sufficient world supplied with things that keep him isolated. A man must have his own tractor because he rarely interacts with his neighbor at all, so it makes borrowing an issue.

It goes beyond sharing commonly used items, too. If fifty acres of wheat need harvesting, he, his wife, and his 2.1 children can’t do it by themselves if they try to do it by inexpensive hand labor—they need the machinery that will enable them to work alone. The machinery costs money—a lot of money. Now they’ve got to work even harder to make more money to afford the expensive machines, the fuel to power them, and their upkeep. Maybe the wife takes an outside job now. And the kids wind up latchkey kids because he’s moonlighting at night and there’s that overlap when both he and his wife are gone. It’s all too common and the reason is that there is no community left that will come to his side to eliminate his need for the expensive equipment in the first place.

What if instead of going bankrupt trying to buy a $75,000 combine, all his neighbors came over and helped harvest the wheat using little more than a horse-drawn scythe or two? Inexpensive and communal, too. The labor is divided. Repeat that pattern over a number of families and many hands make for easier work.

Sure, that may work for organic farm communities, hardcore Amish-types, and the like, but what about the VP of Operations at the soap making company? Well, what about him? What are we Christians failing to work through when it comes to problems like this?

Brad’s issue over the American Dream and how it afflicts us Christians will NEVER go away no matter how hard we try unless we jettison our self-sufficiency. If you aren’t part of a community that strategically works to see that no one gets left behind in the grinding wheel of modern life, then each one of us has to have a complete set of stuff to be self-sufficient enough to live. Even Saint Francis could not have been Saint Francis unless some person out there included him in the life of a community. Yes, a few people can drop out altogether and live like hermits, but all of us can’t do that. The only answer is for Christians to start abandoning the pie-in-the-sky idea that we will somehow stop with the self-sufficiency and the requisite materialism that naturally attends it without covering each other’s backs!

Initially we put our parents into nursing homes when they were aged not because we have hard hearts, but because no one would be there to support us in our support of them. Pull the right stick out of the Kerplunk game and all the marbles will fall. Name a problem in our society and I bet you can trace it back to our misguided belief in self-sufficiency.

Ever wonder why there are a hundred different types of breakfast cereal in the grocery store? Self-sufficiency breeds self-centeredness. Self-centeredness naturally evolves into the concept that I am the master of my own kingdom. As a king, I need something that sets me apart from the commoner. They may eat cornflakes, but I need the organic muesli with non-GMO, freeze-dried ollaliberries added. The common becomes despised because I require something better. Whining for “better” promotes greed. Need I say more?

Folks, being more holy won’t fix this. We’ve tried that route and failed miserably. Nor will attempting to live a simpler life get us out from under the burden that reinforces the very complexity we try to avoid. The brick wall awaits and we’re going ninety even with the brakes on. The system is broken at a fundamental level: We lack real, connected community and our need to overcome that lack results in our becoming self-sufficient. If I don’t need you, I need everything that is not you that might replace you. And soon enough, the thing that replaces you is viewed as more essential than you are. Is it any surprise then that we live in such an angry society? If I don’t need you, then all you are doing is competing against me. There’s that Darwinian ethic again—seems to crop up everywhere.

Our self-imposed isolation is destroying us on the inside and driving us to lengths that dishonor God. But a Christian community founded upon the ideals that no one is ignored and that your problem is my problem will not succumb to isolation, self-sufficiency, and materialism. It will naturally avoid living out a disconnected, stingy, ungrateful life before God.

Trying to undo entrenched societal structures that diminish our potential for the Lord takes brave men and women. Any of them still out there?

A Hodgepodge of Thoughts on This July Fourth

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Some things rolling around in my head:

Now that the business series is over, I’ll be the first to admit that a few things got left out. I should’ve talked more about the loss of rites of passage within the Church after the economy shifted from agricultural to industrial. I also did not go into detail about how individual Christians can further their careers by playing the business world’s game while not being destroyed by it. I’ll admit that as the series went on, my conclusions there became more grave and I felt I needed to back off, so this omission on that one issue was intentional. There are several Christian Web sites out there with those talking points, but honestly, they seem to me to be mouthing the same old same old that has not made one dent in a real Christian presence at the heart of business. Like I said in the series: you can gold plate a 1975 AMC Pacer and it’s still a lousy car.

I think our answers must be more radical. Even now I’m reading a book called Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology, and while the author is clueless as to the religious reasons that people abandon the hectic post-industrial lifestyle we have created for ourselves, his book does show the pervasiveness of healthy community found in those groups that have dropped out of the 21st century rat race. 'Miami' by Alex MacLeanI’m not entirely through the book, but I’ve already got a knot in my chest because he’s talking about the same deep need that I am for real community.

We invited some of our neighbors over a couple weekends ago for an impromptu hanging out in our backyard. No real plan. We supplied all the food and we just chatted as the sun went down. I hope that we can develop truly deep friendships with our neighbors, but I am unsure if it will ever live up to what I imagine it can be.

People are too isolated into little islands. If we can’t rely on the communities we form around us, then we are lost as a civilization. And I’m not just talking about a nod here and a wave there; we need to shoulder each other’s burdens in a way that we are simply not doing. The result over our isolation is overburdened lives completely stretched and stressed to the max. God did not make us to live that way. Should we wonder why so many people founder in it?

Maybe we’ve done it all wrong. The amount of money I pay in insurance alone is criminal, but I’m probably underinsured compared with most people. I spend money to make sure nothing happens to my stuff, to my wife, to my child, or to me. Almost every insurance man I know is a backbone in his church. We talk about wise stewardship of the things God has given us, for sure, but what if our insurance was meant to come from the community of Christ instead? Should my house burned down, what if it was that community—a community that lived directly around me comprised of the saints of God—that shouldered that burden with me. And what if I shouldered theirs? Doesn’t that make so much more sense than what we have now?

We reach out through copper wire and satellite feeds and spill our thoughts into the ether about this and that, but is that community? In my soul, it just doesn’t feel like the same kind of thing I get when my neighbor walks over with a newspaper clipping about a used book sale she thought would appeal to me. If I need a wrench, do I buy it from the Internet, or do I walk over to my neighbor’s and borrow one?

We almost never ask if there is more truth in one over the other. Our perpetual blindness to the way that systems erupt and take hold of us without our thinking bothers me, and I feel as if too many of us have stopped asking the hard questions. Every day lately I wonder if we are not trying to solve the core problems of what it means to live out a real Christian presence as a vital community of faith because we gave up trying to do so. Those problems are intractable, right? Better that the wave just carry us along than we question it.

I wonder if we are far more impoverished in the depths of our being than we understand. Perhaps the injuries we’ve suffered by uprooting the very good for what we initially perceived to be “the even better” has not turned around and bitten us—and we have yet to realize we are bleeding.

For the first time ever this year, I’ve had to reject medical treatments for my family because they were too costly, despite the fact that we have insurance. Did God offer a different kind of medicine, but we scorned it in favor of what grew to be the monolithic healthcare system we have now? At what part of the process did we fumble the ball?

Sales of iPods continue unabated and people risk being oddballs if they don’t have one. But what if we stopped working so hard to buy the massive overload of gadgetry we are told we must have in order to define ourselves or to keep us from being seen as out-of-step? Is out-of-step the worst label we could bear? Could we recover some portion of a life without these things, a life that has more of God in it and less Nokia or Sony or Dell? I’m still astounded at the fact that everyone seems to have a cellphone now when just seven years ago I had no friends who owned one. What did we do before frying our brains with unproven technology became de rigueur? Are our lives better for it? Does the cellphone on our ear replace something that God put in place but we in our desire for rocket packs elected to abandon?

The Church never seemed to question the Industrial Revolution and I can’t see how they could not. And yet we today with the benefit of seeing through the lens of history have the same tunnel vision. The recent post on psychology opened up huge wounds in a lot of readers and the comments on that post are the harshest this blog has ever seen. But are we better people because of psychology? Was the whole world nuts in 1835 compared to today? I’m not sure I see the absolute benefit, but I certainly see the harm psychology has caused the Church. Doesn’t it seem like we gained a handful of toothpicks and lost the entire forest? Isn’t that true of far too many things today?

Perhaps my great-great-grandfather was a better man than I am. Maybe for lack of all the gadgets and gizmoes, for want of THE LATEST KNOWLEDGE™, he was a more satisfied man, too. Could it be the community he lived in knew more about what it took to be a real neighbor?

I think the Church in America has to decide at some point when it will get off the treadmill. I think for our own souls’ sake, we have to. When that will be, I don’t know. I know that ultimately satisfaction is found only after we die, but I sure would like to see a lot more of heaven this side of it. Isn’t that why the Church exists?

Been rambling too long. Just looking out at the fireflies dancing just beyond my reach and wondering….

{Image: “Miami” by Alex MacLean}