Honey should we buy the 52” LCD TV?

The day after September 11, 2001, the President of the United States held a news conference.  The nation was rattled by the horrific events of the previous day and there was widespread desire to contribute to the national healing that had to take place.  One of the reporters, echoing precisely the question the country had in its collective mind, asked the question: “Mr. President, what do you want the citizens of the country to do now?”.  The President without any hesitation answered: “I want everyone to go to the malls and shop”.  The President was pilloried in some quarters for recommending such a selfish act of shopping and not calling the country to a collective sense of purpose. 

Consumption and material possession evokes mixed feelings in most people.  I believe the dichotomy to the act of shopping reflects a more fundamental ambivalence we have to the concept of material possession.  We are often conditioned in our thinking about material possession by our subscription to certain moral values and economic principles.  I believe there is a third dimension to the question of material possession that should influence our decision.  Before I expound on this dimension, let us take a closer look at how most of us are conditioned in our ambivalence by our moral values and our understanding of economic theories.

Many people look to the scriptures to get a moral guidance on basic every day topics.  However, the scriptures have conflicting advice on this topic.  Let us take Timothy 6:8 “But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that”.  Here the Bible sides with frugality and espouses consuming only what is needed for subsistence.  But let us turn the page and look at Matthew 6:31 and it says “But seek thee first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you” which could be interpreted to say you seek God, material possessions will come to you in plenty.  Here possession in itself is not castigated. 

I have to say this ambivalence to material possession is not limited to the Christian scriptures.  I am of the Hindu faith.  In the Hindu spiritual books, we have the same conflicting guidance.  At various times, austerity is praised.  And at other times we are also taught that God’s blessing is needed for one to acquire wealth and material possessions.  We even have a God, in our pantheon of Gods, who you propitiate to acquire wealth.  You often see the wealthier people seeking this God’s blessing with even more vigor.

Turning from the spiritual to the economics, there are two schools of thoughts with regards to consumption.  When the economic times are good, I have seen many a TV shows where the pop economists rail about the virtue of Japanese and other eastern cultures where the per capita savings is very high.  The implied message from these economists often is that US is living way beyond its means and consumption is not healthy for the national economy.  But when there is a down turn in the economy and the consumers tighten their wallets, the same economists seek a stimulus package to encourage consumer spending.  I am no economist, and so are majority of the population, but the conflicting positions are confusing to say the least.

So what should an ordinary person, the Joe six-pack, do?  When you have to make a decision about that 52” TV, or the sun room extension to your house, or to buy the high tech Video game console, is there another way of viewing this decision?  I think the answer is yes.

This third view is to look at in the larger context of the meaning of life.  After all we have one life to live and we are all searching for the core of life called happiness.  And a measure of happiness is the strength and depth of bond that you form with your loved ones and friends.  The fabric of bond is knitted over your lifetime by increasing the opportunities to spend time together and sharing common experiences. In this modern world, where our time is fissured into so many activities, all of us have an obligation to increase the opportunities where you can spend the time together and weave that knit of bonding tighter. 

The 52” TV could be the catalyst for you to sit with your son and enjoy a football game.  Or the week long vacation in a cabin in the wilderness of Pocono Mountains could be the perfect setting for you, your spouse and children to read a book together and tell each other what it means to each of you.  Such moments of intimacy, as the TV commercial says, are priceless.

So while we have many guideposts in our life and we live our life to fit within these guideposts, it would serve you well once in a while to look at your pedestrian life decisions in a larger context.  When you look back 10 or 20 years and ruminate on the memories, you may be wondering why I didn’t do it more often.

Value of beauty

One day recently, I opened the business section of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, my hometown newspaper, and saw a news item titled “Job hunters seek leg up by having plastic surgery”. The article was reporting on a recent trend among the 50 something to resort to plastic surgery to look young and remove any negatives of being an older person in the job market.  The article quoted several job seekers and plastic surgeons to indicate that a nip and tuck, and Botox go a long way to wash away the girth and wrinkles from aging.  One quote in particular stood out ‘The seasoned experts, once pictured in ads with lots of wrinkles, have been replaced by young go-getters with multiple degrees and the appearance of boundless energy.”

As a 50 something myself, the article was unsettling to say the least.  I was thinking what we have come to as a society.  I started to question whether it is the vigor or the beauty that is more important to a society.

We all know that the head turns are reserved only for the beautiful looking people.  Marilyn Monroe is known all around the world not for her accomplishments, but because of her buxom body in her pin up posters.  Few years back an actress from India, named Ash Rai, was being referred to as the most beautiful woman in the world.  You couldn’t get a more absolute statement than that “the most beautiful woman in the world”.  It is as if there is some kind of meter or scale and one can measure one’s beauty in a quantitative scale and score them.  I wish I knew where I can get that scale.

So if you are a non-beautiful looking person or like me, downright ugly looking, here is my advice.  Take heart in what Benjamin Franklin said “Beauty, like supreme dominion, is but supported by opinion”.  Other commonly known phrases “But beauty is only skin deep” mean the same.  But the most important phrase that I like is “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”.  It is up to you to project what you want about you to the beholder. 

Let us say we are in a party and we strike up a conversation with few people.  One is young and beautiful and the other slightly older and with a few wrinkles.  I bet you are going to turn to the young one first. But let us say you soon realize she is just an empty head with not a whole lot to add to the conversation.  However, the one with some wrinkles is entertaining, lucid and has a great sense of humor.  You are going to quickly forget the beauty and look at what the person has to offer to you.

This fact applies to every situation in life.  Beauty is truly skin deep.  It is what is in your head that matters most.  So the not so young ones among us, you don’t have to resort to the nip and tuck.  Just sharpen your tongue and your wit and you can overcome the disadvantages of the wrinkles.

Barack Obama was elected President of the United States in 2008.  He ran on a message of Hope.  I actively volunteered on his campaign and I was touched by the message of Hope that he so eloquently articulated and ran on.  I was moved to write an essay about what Hope meant to me.  Here is my essay.

What is Hope?  Before I answer that, let us see what Hope has done for us.  Hope, a four letter word of the English lexicon, has been the clarion call that has shaped the political evolution of humanities from time immemorial. 

In 1905, when a 5 foot 2inch Indian barrister, practicing law in South Africa, was victimized by the laws of racial segregation and inequality perpetrated by the British colonialists, he realized that the same system was subjugating his own countrymen in his motherland.  He traveled back to India and gave hope to his countrymen to fight for a country free from the shame of subjugation and exploitation by their occupiers.  His people, who would call him Mahatma which means noble soul, rallied around his message of hope to free them from the shackles of oppression and the depravity of colonialism. 

A few decades later, a Baptist minister from Georgia, used again the message of hope to rally a nation to see the inequities and ugliness of racial segregation.  He shared with the nation his dream and hope for a day, when a person would be judged by the content of their character instead of the color of their skin.  A nation, founded on the principles of equality and liberty, and only too eager to recoil from the blot on its collective psyche, rallied again to the message of hope and passed landmark civil rights laws to restate its belief of equality of all its citizens.

And then recently, a man who was imprisoned for 24 years in his native land of South Africa, used his message of hope to bring his captors to their knees and disband an oppressive regime of Apartheid.  His message of hope not only rung loud with his fellow countrymen, but across all of humanity.  Nations across the world shunned the government of his captors and crippled their ability to continue their barbarity.

So what is so powerful about Hope that it can move humanities, an entire nation and sometimes the entire world?  All human beings at their core are romanticists and dreamers.  They aspire for circumstances and opportunities beyond what they endure or enjoy as the circumstance may be.  And Hope is that innate spirit in every human being that makes them work for a better tomorrow. 

Hope is not limited to just political aspirations.  Hope plays a role in our every day life as well.  A single mother, on a shoe string budget, when she struggles to feed her children, or to house them or to educate them, finds the energy to keep going only because she hopes for a better future for her children.  Hope of a disease free life is what gives strength to a cancer patient to withstand the ravages of radiation treatment or chemo therapy.  Hope in our scientists ability to use stem cell technology to find cures for genetic disorders, is what encourages a mother to carry a fetus to term even with the knowledge that the child could be severely autistic. 

And hope plays a role, when a community reeling with the effects of drugs and violence, comes together and fights for reclaiming their streets and neighborhoods, and makes it a safe environment for raising their next generation.  A nation, when it reels under the effects of lost jobs, lowering wages, disappearing factories, finds its resilience in the hope that this time will pass and a better day will emerge. 

And it was again that message of hope that we saw played out right in front of our eyes these last eighteen months.  When an unknown senator from the State of Illinois, pointed out that we don’t have to invade a country that did not attack us for us to feel safe;  that we don’t have to be suspicious of each other to the extend that we have to wire tap our own citizens to feel safe; that we don’t have to suspend some of the fundamental essence of our constitution to feel safe; that we don’t have to forgo the decency of our humanity and our abhorrence to torture to feel safe; that we don’t have to be scared into a constant state of fear to feel safe.  That thoughtful senator instead challenged us to have the audacity to hope for the promised land that the preacher said we could have, the promised land where the decision to spill American blood will not be made callously; the promised land where the constitution will be held sacred again; the promised land where all children will have a shot at the American dream through access to education; the promised land where all its citizens can have comfort in the knowledge that medical care is accessible and affordable; the promised land where we know that we will leave behind a planet that is better than the one we inherited.

It was the promise of hope that moved the nation to elect that man, whose ancestors had survived the gallows of ships of slavery, to the White House and declare to the world “Yes, We Can”.

So hope is a four letter word, but I don’t cringe when I hear it, but a smile creases my face.