The End of Excess?

I'm pretty conflicted as to how I truly feel about this essay from Time Magazine, entitled "The End of Excess: Is This Crisis Good For America?"

On the one hand, I like how the article directly addresses American greed and consumerism, and isn't afraid to accuse the previous social period (the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s) of being a time of extreme excess. I think it's good to lay some of the blame at the feet of people who WEREN'T on Wall Street; as much as it's fun and feels good to blame bankers and CEOs for our problems, the fact is that they weren't the only ones buying houses they couldn't afford or saving less than 1% of their incomes every year. It's the culture that's to blame here, not just a particular type of person; they may have spoon-fed us these ridiculous ideas about mortgages and savings and credit cards, but we could have spit that spoon out, and we didn't.

I mean, I liked this passage a lot:

We saw what was happening for years, for decades, but we ignored it or shrugged it off, preferring to imagine that we weren't really headed over the falls. The U.S. auto industry has been in deep trouble for more than a quarter-century. The median household income has been steadily declining this century ... but, but, but our houses and our 401(k)s were ballooning in value, right? Even smart, proudly rational people engaged in magical thinking, acting as if the new power of the Internet and its New Economy would miraculously make everything copacetic again. We all clapped our hands and believed in fairies.

On the other hand, though, the author of the article assumes too much about the average American for my taste. Not EVERYONE bought into this system, and now, plenty of people who have spent their lives being smart and cautious about money are suffering the same effects from the Great Recession as the people who spent all their money on McMansions and Hummers.

I'm not trying to hold myself up as a paragon of virtue here (har har— that would be HILARIOUS...Philosophy the Great! Philosophy the Virtuous!), but y'know, I'm not exactly a spendy gal. As I've previously mentioned many times here (read: relentlessly harped upon), I buy my clothes second-hand, I cook most of my own meals, I make my husband repair things, and I get as much stuff for free as I can. We don't use credit cards, we don't have a mortgage, we only have one car (and that car doesn't belong to us— it's a loaner Dodge Caravan that my parents offered to lend us after Adam's truck-totaling accident; after this summer, when we return the car, we won't have a car at all), and we have six months of basic expenses accumulated in savings— even after we only made a combined income of $22,000 last year.

So we're pretty financially savvy, but while our fiscal prowess has saved us some of the pain that other people are feeling (no big mortgage = no foreclosure, no expensive cars = no repossession, nice savings account = no complete panic when Adam was laid off), we still have to deal with the crappy job market like everyone else. I mean, I'm a Vassar-educated writer who obtained a full, merit-based scholarship to one of the best high schools IN THE WORLD, and my job is to answer a phone and mail care packages to my bosses' children at college, so it's clear that the opportunities here in Y-town are slim to none. I'd apply for a different job, but THERE ARE NO OTHER JOBS. The classifieds section in the paper only runs the same three ads per week under the "employment" heading: "Dancers wanted (must be over 18)", "Work at home and earn CASH CASH CASH!" and "Registered nurse wanted"— and that last ad is sure to disappear, considering Forum Health (our large health care network here) just filed for Chapter 11.

I suppose that, in the end, this simply proves that we're all interconnected— that the idiot with too many houses and too many cars and too many kids and not enough cash to pay for all of them can affect my life, even if I don't want that to happen. The article touches upon this a little bit:

The utterly international nature of our present economic hell makes it all the scarier. But in the long run, I think we will also see an upside: the meltdown amounts to a spectacular moment of global consciousness, this generation's version of the Apollo astronauts' iconic 1968 photograph of the earth from the moon — an unforgettable reminder that all 6.7 billion of us are in this together, profoundly and inextricably interdependent. (The sublime always has a bit of terror mixed in.)

But I still don't know how I feel about this article. I mean, I agree with the importance of sobriety and belt-tightening, and I always like to see people being responsible, but I guess I also feel like the article makes it sound as though we're all just giving up luxuries during this recession instead of struggling to pay our basic expenses like rent, food, and gas.

Thoughts?