How can your glass be half full in this economy?
There's seemingly only one story in the media now - the economy. Its gloomy handprint is on every topic. It colors stories about homemaking, fashion, schools, fitness and health as well as stories where you'd expect to find it: finance, jobs, cars, colleges.
Glance at any magazine and you'll see it. Even the most vapid celebrity rags shout it in their headlines as you wheel your cart into a checkout line. Enter any conversation and it will come up.
What's not being said is that our dire economic situation has a silver lining.
It's small and doesn't alleviate the suffering of those in the eye of the storm, but it is there.
It is that we are learning to do more with less. We are rediscovering that material possessions are not most important, but that spirituality, friends and family, neighbors and strangers are. We are relearning how to recycle, how to re-purpose something old, how to use what we have to create the new things we want. We look at the problems of everyday life and are more likely to think, "How can I solve this without spending money? How can I meet this need without consuming expensive resources?"
We are looking with new eyes at overconsumption, which in the past decade might, just might, have gotten the better of us.
Yes, the wild home-building spree of the past decades churned out wealth and ramped up jobs and incomes. But it also gobbled up some of the best farmland on the planet. Driving anywhere in suburban Chicago over the past 10 years made me uneasy: The farms were vanishing. It is true almost anywhere in the Midwest: Des Moines, Minneapolis, Kansas City. Sprawling subdivisions grew and grew, like a cedar-clapboard form of kudzu. Our rich topsoil, created over millennia but ruined in an instant by construction, was vanishing before our eyes under an advancing ocean of shopping center parking lots.
Is it all bad that the brakes have been put on expansion?
Does anyone else drive past a farm field with its sign "Shopping center to open Fall 2009" that now reads "Shopping center to open XXXX" and think silently, "That's not entirely bad."
When gas hit $4 per gallon, it was painful. It hurt. Yet, underneath my flood of squawking about the price, ran a tiny rivulet of realization that $4 gas is the only way to make us stop guzzling it. We can talk about saving fossil fuels and Al Gore can implore us to move back to the cities, but talk doesn't work. Getting smacked in the wallet works.
Our grandparents came of age in the Great Depression, and their thrifty resourcefulness is in our DNA. This economy might teach our college student to search freecyle.org or Craigslist for the shelving she wants, rather than automatically default to Linens N Things (which, speaking of default, is out of business.)
Is it all bad to learn to reuse what's there rather than consume new?
Secondhand stores are booming. Goodwill Industries' stats show it has posted an 8 percent increase in sales in greater Chicago and southeast Wisconsin during the fourth quarter as major chain stores decreased 1.9 percent. And last month, the Daily Herald reported that library checkouts in Elgin jumped 18 percent over last year, with daily attendance there showing a 50 percent increase.
In the past 10 years, the number of new products in our grocery stores ballooned 50 percent, including new flavors, formulas, and sizes of existing lines. Now, some of that is being quietly cut, according to The Associated Press.
Really, could it all boom forever? Might this bust be a necessary correction? Might we all be better off long-term if we pull back just a bit now from rampant consumption?
The economy waxes and wanes, expands and contracts, and has since its beginning. When it's good, we think the good times will roll forever. When it's bad, we fear the bad times will ruin us forever. Not true. The truth is, this too shall pass, and we will emerge from it with our finances in tatters but our souls intact.
• Cheryl Stritzel McCarthy writes about Naperville. E-mail her at otbfence@hotmail.com.