Money Changes Everything
Categories: In the News , Staff Picks
A few days ago I heard a NPR story about a woman who decided to forego buying things from China for a year. It reminded me of the book I'm currently reading by an author who decided to opt out of the consumer market by not buying anything for one year. As I listened to the news piece and connected the books I thought how nice it must be to make the decision to not buy anything as opposed to not having the money to purchase, which is the way it is for some Americans.
As John Edwards continues his poverty tour during his bid for the '08 democratic nomination, we are again reminded of the lines drawn between the haves and the have-nots in this country. The poor's approach to consumerism is completely different than those of financial means because they don't have the wherewithal to spend. There's no statement they can make on mass consumption by withholding their dollars because more than likely they don’t spend frivolously enough to be missed
A current book that best illustrates this conundrum is Money Changes Everything: Twenty-Two Writers Tackle the Last Taboo with Tales of Sudden Windfalls, Staggering Debts, and Other Surprising Turns of Fortune. Writing on one of the last taboos of polite conversation, fiction and non-fiction writers such as Chris Offut, Meera Nair and Isabel Rose tackle the subject sometimes with humor, sadness, or poignancy.
Perhaps unwittingly, each of the personal essays shows how money is not just green paper but also a statement of who they are by how much they have, how they live, where they live and what they (or other people around them) are willing to do to get it. Daniel Handler, whose literary nom de plume is Lemony Snicket, wrote his essay about purchasing a bottle of wine with his payment for his submission to the book and then discussed how people reacted when he told them the price. Felicia Sullivan's essay is of her childhood with a drug addict and grifter for a mother. My favorite pieces were the two done by a husband and wife team Fred Lebron and Kathryn Rhett. Oddly enough, they start out similar (nearly word for word) as they discuss their carefree fun days without money in the beginning of their marriage but their relationship to money (and ideas about it) diverge once they decide to settle down and start a family.
In a fake it till you make it society that we like to think of as without class boundaries, Money Changes Everything is an excellent foray into a topic that not many like to talk about.
Other books on this topic:
Class Matters by New York Times
Where We Stand: Class Matters by bell hooks
