Walking out my front door unto our porch, the warm sun felt wonderful on my face. I stepped around the red snow shovel, sitting idly next to the 50 pound sack of salt. On Tuesday it was 15 degrees with a foot of snow on the ground. Five days later it’s in the mid 60’s, with a bright sun blazing through the clearing clouds. The same thing happened last week. Deep cold, snow and ice, followed in the same week by temps that bring summer to mind.

When I was younger I would simply take it all as a gift and enjoy it. Another warm December day? Put on a t-shirt, open a beer and enjoy life! But today I tend to bounce between extremes, just like the temperature, feeling both happy and guilty. A run in the warm air, no hat and no gloves, with my dutiful dog trotting along side. Heaven on earth. And a reminder that climate change is real, that the world my kids are inheriting is not the same as the one I grew up in, and a sense of guilt as I wonder: Did I do this to them? What will their lives be like?

I’m thinking about starting a new Facebook group, “Christians who love The Onion.” There must be a few more people out there like me. Nice people, having devotions, walking with God, who occasionally revel in absolute sarcasm. If there are, I bet they Facebook.

Anyway, The Onion nailed it again in their article, “Recession-Plagued Nation Demands New Bubble.” The Onion article begins,

“A panel of top business leaders testified before Congress about the worsening recession Monday, demanding the government provide Americans with a new irresponsible and largely illusory economic bubble in which to invest.

‘What America needs right now is not more talk and long-term strategy, but a concrete way to create more imaginary wealth in the very immediate future," said Thomas Jenkins, CFO of the Boston-area Jenkins Financial Group, a bubble-based investment firm. "We are in a crisis, and that crisis demands an unviable short-term solution.’"

                Does consumerism have a cost?  We could talk about the environment. We could look at the UN’s recent study that showed, between 1954 and 2004, 80% of the world’s population became poorer, and 20% became wealthier. We could look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and how marketing always pushes consumers to the two lowest levels of need (safety and belonging), and then wonder about how that constant push messes with our minds, our faith, and our relationships. In Evangelical circles, “spiritual warfare” is often defined as God blessing us with stuff (“God blessed me with a new car!”) and the Devil busily taking stuff away (“I’m being attacked! I’m going to lose my house!”). We pursue oil in Iraq to fuel our SUV’s, as part of a moral crusade (“battling Evil”).

        Did you know that the United States has the most people imprisoned per capita in the world? I mean the whole world, including Russia, China, Albania, wherever. According to the US Department of Justice annual report, on this very day about 2.3 million Americans are in prison. Add in people on probation, and the number is over 3% of our total population. The current rate is four times higher than in 1980. What? How can that be? Even more striking, 1 out of 10 young Black males are in prison. In fact, if you are a young Black male, you have a much better chance of going to prison than going to college. 10.4% of all black males between 25 and 29 years old are in prison, 1.3% of white males the same age. 75% of women imprisoned are single mothers. What’s going on?

I’m awkwardly bent at the waist, shuffling like a penitent monk as I search for my winter clothes in our low-slung attic. I always forget to stay low, till the inevitable “thunk” of my head reminds me to repent. Why do I even have winter clothes? What does that mean, to have clothes that are seasonal? In most cold places I’ve traveled, people just put on more of what they have, relying on layers instead of Gortex. It is a strange world I live in. 

So I’m writing on consumerism. Not just consumerism, but the bigger picture, the impact our nation’s insatiable appetite for more has on other parts of our increasingly small globe. As I mentioned, I do this hesitantly. It’s just too close to home, so painfully obvious in my attic, as I swap out Dry-Fit for Gortex. But, as blogs seem to be as much about self-confession as about anything else, I’m going to press on. How does American consumerism impact others? Does my personal wealth, evidenced in my clothing options, affect Nigeria?

I found myself watching Barak Obama’s speech on race this week. My wife had just completed a conference on “Ending Racism.” As we talked about the challenges she was working through, we realized that we had not watched the speech in its entirety. The Youtube video was captured from CNN’s March 18^th live broadcast, so the entire speech had a yellow news ticker moving slowly across the bottom of the screen. As engaging as the speech was, my eyes kept slipping down to the news ticker. “The economic downturn will be relatively mild, according to the numbers, says Mr. Mark Vitner, Wachovia Economist.” Hmmmm. October  3, 2008: Wachovia has imploded; its remains are sold to Wells Fargo. Was that Mr. Vitner who just handed me a diet Coke at McDonalds?

The yellow ticker was weird, like hearing the echo of a distress signal from a ship that has already sunk.  Such innocence! Such hope! “The IRS will begin sending $130 million in tax rebates” slowly inched along the bottom of the screen. Remember that? $130 million was a lot of money! Wow, $130 million in checks sent straight to Americans, who would surely know what to do with that money: spend it quickly on junk they don’t need. But guess what? We put 80% of the rebate in the bank or paid off debt. The next time the government would do an “intervention,” they would learn their lesson. From now on, money goes straight to companies.

A cool day in Nyack, with a clear view of the Hudson. The Tappan Zee is a strange straight line reaching into Westchester. Wyclef Jean sings in the background about being grateful, “stopped by the cops, but they didn’t find the Glock!” My current musical obsession. Today is for writing and reading. The ultimate luxury.

I want to write about consumerism. Ironic, I guess. I know as soon as I do, I’ll implicate myself, a very comfortable academic living in an idyllic town resting in the deep shadow of New York City. By “consumerism,” I mean what Veblen wrote about back in 1899 in his ground breaking work, “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” “Consumerism is the equation of personal happiness with the purchase of material possessions and consumption.”

Last week I was asked by a Christian magazine to put together one paragraph on “where I see hope. “ To be honest, I wasn’t feeling very hopeful at the time. About three years ago, my wife and I put $1000 into a fund for a twentieth anniversary trip. Where ever the fund ends up, that’s what we allocate for our trip. This would be fun! I was thinking Cruise. Maybe Bermuda? Sunny and warm. Sand would be involved. Food. We would return to the frozen northeast wonderfully tanned, vividly declaring our success with deep skin tones. Shamelessly wearing brightly colored short-sleeved shirts with shells on them. Ah, life.

Today that fund will take Ticia and me on a slow walk to downtown Nyack for a cheap sandwich and a can of diet coke. I think we’ll hold on to it until our twenty fifth. Hope?  Was that trip why I got out of bed in the morning? But I kept thinking about it. I work at a Christian college because I have hope in God’s desire to work in the lives of students. What about you? What gives you hope? If our hope was in the market, then our hope was misplaced. Politics? Roughly 50% of our country is about to be terribly disappointed. Perhaps this is a good time to clarify what makes us tick. Why do we get up in the morning? Like me, take a moment to check. If you have another minute, post it for others to read.

David Brooks is one of my favorite Op-Ed writers for the New York Times. True, he can be a little hyper-conservative, but at least he’s hyper-conservative in the New York Times, which polls recently proved was not read by real Americans, just US citizens living in non-American places, like New York. So, it all balances out.

On Tuesday he wrote a column about the markets and behavior. As I read it, I kept thinking about the fall. I mean THE FALL. The red fruit on the tree fall, not the golden leaves on the ground fall. The event which disconnected us from God and, at the same time, from Reality. We moved into dark caves of self-centeredness, more connected to our own demanding selves than the hopes and needs of others. Our personal perspectives permanently skewed by a need to be in control.

Some of us have a nutty Uncle in the family. The guy who does outlandish things, sometimes crossing the line between being an amusing eccentric and a dangerous embarrassment. I see that today in our Nation’s   “Uncle Sam.” He is a collective. A mirror image of all us, usually seems a little odd; he is never quite where we are. But in his defense, he can’t be more than the sum of our hopes and fears. We can make him out through the foggy window of the media, doddering around, picking up things he should not; a befuddled and bewildering presence in our world.