Bristol Cathedral

What is a High Quality of Life?
I once lived for an entire year as an exchange student with a British family in Bristol, UK. Their house, one end of a three-house row, contained three bedrooms, one bathroom, small living and dining rooms, and a tiny kitchen, too small for eating in. They owned one car, a little Vauxhall, and one TV, yet considered themselves well able to feed, house, and entertain a stranger for an entire year.

By American middle-class standards, this family was practically poor, yet their four children received great educations. They attended excellent live theatre all the time; I saw eight professional plays, a handful of concerts, and numerous movies that year, not to mention visiting art museums, historic parks, and nature reserves. The mom sang in an impressive city choir, and their small hallway contained a piano. Their street and tiny front yard were well-cared for and attractive. My school was safe and good. The National Health Service tended to their illness and dental needs (and mine). Their local library was big and well-stocked. We ate healthy breads, fresh fruit and vegetables every day, fresh creams, cheeses, small amounts of good meat. They read good newspapers and watched the BBC. They volunteered both officially, for organizations, and unofficially helping neighbors and relatives. They took vacations to Cornwall and to Spain as well as weekend excursions. In terms of health, personal development, and community, their quality of life was enviable.

Supposedly, in the Bay Area and especially San Jose, we’re a lot more fortunate. One federal report said San Jose had the highest disposable income of any city in the U.S., and even after the crash, that’s probably still true. Any number of our streets feature houses and yards easily three times the size of my British home. I see stunning cars, three to a family, private schools with stellar facilities. And yet the City of San Jose is proposing to cut library hours to three days a week, cut the pay of unionized labor ten percent in addition to “significant layoffs,” and much more. One might think San Jose was as poor as Detroit. Is it really true that we can’t afford libraries? Are we so strapped for cash that kindergartens have to have thirty kids in each class?

Tea Party While Rome Burns? This situation leaves me torn between despair and disbelief. Instead of a rich community web, we have two worlds: a lush private society and an emaciated public one. The people most buffeted and slammed by these cuts are, as always, the poor. The tea partyers tell us that this is for the best. What’s most important is to “Leave our earnings alone.” A CBS News/New York Times poll released on Tax Day found that Tea Party activists are wealthier than average … and better educated. Let the Haves give what they want when they want — that seems to be their spiritually bankrupt motto. Is there government waste? Sure, and it galls me too, especially when government money is siphoned off from the public and firehosed onto the rich with the aid of wealthy people’s lawyers. But while I’ve seen national health on the list of tea party complaints, I haven’t seen our two costly wars.

National Divestment in Youth. And the Have-nots? I have a question without an answer: what does a young person do today who can’t find a job and can’t get into college? Tell me, Tea Party. Tell me, citizens of this city, county, state, and nation. I’ve already met students in remedial English who should have been at a UC — they were smart enough — but they had worked thirty hours a week at McDonald’s throughout high school and still worked full-time in college in order to help pay their families’ rent and buy one modest car because otherwise they couldn’t get to work. We may lose a generation to our shortsightedness.

Blame the Poor. And yet some people — I met one recently — refuse to believe anyone is needy. Ignorant perhaps, clueless, lacking in initiative, sociopathic, but not needy. They believe there exists some bounteous river of scholarships and welfare, so full it’s overflowing. How can they think this? Apparently because they themselves, though admittedly upper middle class, have been able to find all manner of public and private assistance for their own kids’ education. Hilariously — in a sick way — a particular woman I spoke to worked for the federal government, but many non-government wealthy hold the same opinions. Post-Katrina, I remember a newscast in which the reporter asserted that all of the people on the “bottom” had their needs taken care of. According to them, better-off people comprised the true unfortunate.

A Link to Other Disasters in History? There’s a scene in Erich Remarque’s book The Black Obelisk, based on his own eyewitness knowledge of Germany, which depicts the rise of the Nazis. Wounded veterans, widows, and others on a fixed income marched in the streets begging for help, shouting for help because inflation had left them unable to buy food, heat, or medicine. The liberal government fiddled and delayed; the profiteers made fortunes; but one group held up signs at the end of the march: Veterans, pensioners, come to Hitler. Hitler will help you.

Long before it hit the middle class, local newspapers like La Oferta were talking about job losses. I don’t think the economic downturn is over (though some wealthy institutions and persons have made a full recovery), and that means we have to take meaningful action. How I wish Martin Luther King hadn’t died before the Poor People’s March gathered steam. Those with power and agency speak up and organize to protect their own little enclaves. But poor people who make less than the clerks at government offices, are accustomed to failure and injustice, sometimes inured to it. They go on in their routine because they have to; they may even, out of pride and a wish to fit in, deny or discount their struggles. But our whole society pays a price, materially and spiritually for their suffering, because we are all linked.

Why We Need to Share I don’t believe it’s possible to cut all government waste, and that’s a very annoying reality, but we shouldn’t pretend we get nothing for our taxes or let a festival of finger pointing be our only contribution to the crisis. We are far from being a country of mass corruption. It’s easy to believe that greater taxes are the responsibility of the extremely rich (and certainly they should pay a fairer share) But those less rich need to be generous too. If your income is $100,000 per year, you’re in the top ten percent and you, I, all of us, need, for our own spiritual and community welfare to give — even if some of it is wasted. Until this crisis passes, we may have to drive an older car, take a less expensive vacation, not buy a boat, and accept higher taxes. (Alternately, we could cease our catastrophic military involvements and skip the higher taxes, but assuming these wars will grind on, we can’t wait that long to do what’s right). With each job we save by not slashing our community structure to ribbons, we also preserve surrounding businesses. With each investment we make in resources available to all, such as schools and libraries, we renew our commitment to each other and to the future.

Spiritual Sustenance in Difficult Times In troubled times, it’s important to nourish ourselves with hope and reminders of the values we want to live by. Let me close with some words of comfort and guidance from a book I often turn to: A Path With Heart by the Buddhist psychotherapist Jack Kornfield, a contributor to Tikkun magazine. “We need to be honest in dishonest times when it is easier to fight for our principles than to live up to them. We must awaken in a time when … materialism, possessiveness, indulgence, and military security are widely advertised as the correct basis for human action.” He reminds us, “The positive power of virtue is enormous.”