Eight years ago in a dreary November, I moved to Seattle to
start a new job, in a city where I hardly knew a soul. Unlike most newcomers to
the Northwest, I moved here in an easterly direction, from across the Pacific. I
had been living in Indonesia, a nation with grinding poverty and longstanding
repression of basic freedoms. Yet oddly enough, Indonesians often seemed happier
and more alive than people in my own country.
A basic concept in Indonesia is jam karet, literally “rubber
time.” It means that time is flexible, things happen when they happen, there’s
no need to rush. In part, it reflects the chaos of megacities like Jakarta,
where I lived. Getting across a town as big as New York City, but with no subway
or orderly street pattern, can take hours, whether you’re lounging in an
air-conditioned taxi, crammed into a belching three-wheeled bemo, or hunched
over in a careening bus not designed for a westerner’s six-foot frame.
But jam karet is also a reflection of basic cultural values.
Indonesians generally spend less of their time keeping up with the Sutrisnos,
and more on cementing relationships with those around them, spending time with
family, sitting with friends and neighbors on the street corner while smoking
those infernal clove cigarettes. If you leave out the cigarettes, these
activities are just the sort that holidays are supposed to be about.
Moving from this sunny place on the equator to Seattle at the
start of a drizzly Northwest winter was a shock to my system. But there was a
bigger cultural shock of coming back to my own country at the beginning of the
holiday season. A time of festivity and goodwill, of course, but what I noticed
most of all in my first American holiday season in two years was the orgy of
shopping. Everywhere people buying things or sitting in traffic on their way to
buying things. An alien anthropologist might look at a downtown Seattle street
in December and think that humans were just the worker-slaves used as docile
porters by highly intelligent Bon Marché and Nordstrom bags. It was hard for me
to share in the joy of holiday shopping having just returned from a place where
people did much less shopping and seemed much happier for it. I couldn’t help
thinking that my fellow Americans were so busy buying things for each other that
they had no time for each other, and that saddened me.
But it was good to be home – in my home country at least, if not
my home town – surrounded by the familiar. Yellow school buses. Blue mail boxes.
Uncensored news. Supermarkets full of comfort foods. (I once went to the Raffles
Hotel, one of Southeast Asia’s swankiest, just to pay $5 for a fresh bagel with
cream cheese, flown in direct from New York. I knew there was something wrong
about the whole concept, but that bagel tasted unbelievably good at the time.) I
even enjoyed looking at the window displays of the department stores whose bags
seemed to be enslaving the human race. The troubling thing about my home land
and its lifestyle was that I knew it to be doing more to harm my home planet
than any other nation in history. Among other things, I knew that we Americans,
five percent of the earth’s people, were putting out one-fifth of the greenhouse
gases that are disrupting the entire planet’s climate.
Being home for the holidays got me thinking about oikos, the
Greek word for home, and the root word of both ecology and economy. Shouldn’t we
use this homecoming time to start caring for our collective home, to reconcile
the two descendants of oikos? Isn’t this the time to start making peace, not
war, on the earth?
It’s not easy to be oikos for the holidays, with every
advertisement, store front and elected official urging us on to greater consumer
confidence and truly patriotic spending levels. Yet most of us know deep down
that our time and our love are better gifts than anything we can buy. Perhaps we
haven’t grasped what an amazing gift it would be to tell our grandchildren that
we almost lost the world but held back before it was too late. We saw how we
were hurting the sky and everything underneath it and decided to stop. Or what a
gift it would be to ourselves not to have to tell them, “We could have left you
a decent world but decided you weren’t worth it.”
In this, one of the warmest years in Earth’s recorded history,
I’ll still go holiday shopping and buy what I need to make my loved ones happy.
But I’ll try to remember that, yes, Virginia, the best things in life are free,
and that the atmosphere that makes all life possible is priceless. And that
every time I reduce my consumption of energy or stuff, I’m giving a gift to
myself, my loved ones and every living thing on Earth for decades to come.
John C. Ryan is a Fellow of the New America
Foundation and author of “Over Our Heads: A Local Look at Global Climate.” This
article is courtesy the Center for a New American Dream’s bi-monthly syndicated
column which explores the connections between consumption, quality of life,
environment and values. For more information about the Center, please visit
www.newdream.org.
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