writers block productions

Life as an Art Form
a column about the complexities of life in the Twenty-First Century
John Wingspread Howell, M.Div., LCPC

Food, the Future, and the Fundamentals of the Economy

Pretend with me for a moment that I’ve invited a few people to my home to celebrate the holidays this year. They are not unlike the five people interviewed in an article here at cybrcaf about how the economy has affected their lifestyle. Four out of five sound pretty depressed.

So here we are, my five new cousins and I, sharing Beef: Jan and Emily up from California, Matt from Tulsa, Dean from St. Paul, and Char from here in Chicago.

Dean’s doing well. His business is designed to profit from the down economy. He owns a credit repair company.

Jan, a regional manager for a national accounting firm says, “I’m feeling very frustrated by the economy since it’s I can’t do the things I used to do without even thinking, like shopping or taking the kids to a movie.

Matt, who owns a small manufacturing company says, “I’ve had to lay off some of most experienced and faithful employees. I hate having to do it, but I have to think ahead. If things keep going as they are, the business might fail.”

Emily, a stay home Mom says, “Our entire lives have been turned upside down by the economic crisis! We’re constantly worrying about losing the house or my husband losing his job.” (Note that until now at least, they have lost neither.)

And this is what Char says: “This down-turn has ruined my life. After twenty years my bank’s out of business and my job is gone. My retirement’s gone. I was a senior VP. All this time, I busted my tail for them thinking it would pay off, thinking they’d take care of me, thinking that if any job was safe, that one was. And now? Nothing! Where ’m I going to find another job at that level? And how long can I hold on? What if I don’t ever find one?”

So here we all are. Dean’s feeling guilty for being upbeat. I—a writer by the way (how did you guess)-- am not sure what to say. So I just say, “Please pass the salad.”

I can see that Dean is feeling very antsy. I ask him, “ Dean, what’s on your mind?”

“Well, I’m almost afraid to say anything,” he hedges. “I remember what happened to John McCain when he said, ‘The fundamentals of the economy are strong—“

“But I thought you voted for Obama,” Char interrupted.

“I did, but I still believe McCain was right about the fundamentals of the economy.”

“Enlighten me,” Char said, her tone laced with cynical contempt.

“The emphasis is on the fundamentals,” Dean said. “Think about the ocean. There could be a hurricane raging on the surface but you don’t have to dive very deep to find things as calm and peaceful as ever.”

“Tell that to the guy in a sailboat tossed around on the waves,” Jan quips.

“That’s exactly what I would tell him,” Dean counters. We all stop eating and look at him. It suddenly appears that Dean knows something we don’t.

“I’d tell him to grab his oxygen tank, mask, & wet suit and dive down.  Later I’d ask him why he was out there in a small sailboat when he knew the forecast called for a storm. And then, I’d sell him a submarine I just happened to have waiting, gassed up and ready to go.”

“Cute, Dean, real cute,” Emily says, with exaggerated sarcasm.

“No, wait,” I say, “I think he’s onto something. And… could I have some stuffing? It must have gone right past me when I wasn’t looking.”

“You get it, don’t you, Johnny?” He says, smiling.  Dean was always my favorite cousin. We click.

“Speak, oracle, speak!” Char turns her venom on me.

“Well, I think he’s saying that the fundamentals of the economy are that there is always opportunity. Like the guy in the sailboat, the business you are in might not be doing well in the current climate, but the same dynamics that make it hard for your business to survive the storm are making everyone related to the submarine industry very wealthy.”

I thought I was pretty clever, picking up on Dean’s metaphor.

“That’s part of it, Johnny,” Dean says, a self-congratulatory gleam in his eye. “But there’s more.”

“I know there’s more, Cuz! Let me finish.”

“Please do,” he says smirking, making a broad sweeping motion with his right hand.

“Well, here’s the way I see it…”

And here’s a summary of the rest of what I said, and Dean said, to fill in what I left out.

What are the fundamentals of the economy? They are the economic ocean beneath the surface of the current economic weather. They are the givens, the facts and factors that, if you are able to dive below the surface, will never betray you. They are the place you return to re-group and make your plan B when plan A has been blown to smitherines. But what are they?

1.    From crisis comes opportunity. There is always a dialectic between crisis and opportunity. In every crisis there is opportunity to help those who are suffering, to fill gaps that are left by those who have lost, to fill needs that the old system can no longer fill, to clean up messes made by the current storm. Times are always good for one or the other. Sometimes it’s the car dealer, sometimes it’s the repo-man. Sometimes it’s the credit card companies, sometimes it’s the identity theft specialists. Sometimes it’s Saks, sometimes it’s Salvation Army, but when Saks is hurting sales are booming at the thrift store. And vice versa.
2.    The first is true, thanks to a free market economy. The second pillar is capitalism. The irony is that when times are bad, we need capitalism more than ever. That’s when people start talking about wanting to over-regulate, control and manipulate markets, all in the attempt to fix the problems that got us where we are instead of looking for ways to move forward. The problem is, yesterdays solutions won’t protect us from today’s problems. They more often become today’s problems or make today’s problems worse. The freedom of anyone to make a career change, to sell, buy, or start a business, to invent a product, to create a system, is what will eventually bring the overall economy back to health. But only if free markets are protected. Ideas and the freedom to build businesses from them, is the lifeblood of capitalism.
3.    Markets heal themselves. That is the third pillar. Markets are living organisms. They are like animals, in the broader sense (humans included). If there is a cut, they grow a scab and eventually the scab falls off and the skin has no scar. But if it is worse than that, they still heal themselves. They may take a pounding. They may be bruised and sore for a while, but eventually they are stronger than ever for having been challenged. It may take longer, there may be scars, there may be some handicaps that will have to be adapted to, but healing always occurs. And markets are like worms. If they are cut in half, they continue to wiggle and move and eventually grow larger again.  

So once Dean and I finished playing off each other until we had honed and articulated the three fundamental pillars of the economy and everyone asked for second helpings to go around the table, Char pipes up.

“Nice theory, Einsteins, but where’s my lifeboat?”

“Listen to yourself, Char!” Dean said. “You’re like a lost child, waiting for Mom and Dad to come and find you. Now, listen to me: You are your own lifeboat. You say, “the downturn has destroyed my life,” and then you go on about what a blow it is to have lost all those things you depended on. But that’s your problem. You didn’t depend on yourself. You didn’t think ahead, have a plan B. You put all your eggs in your job-basket. Even if your company hadn’t failed, you could have lost your job for all kinds of reasons. You are the captain of your own success—or failure.”

“Easy for you to say,” Emily counters, leaning over and squeezing Char’s shoulder as if Char’s been physically assaulted at the dinner table and needs such a show of support. Turning back to Dean, “Your business is booming while we’re doomed. You’re a vulture, picking the last pieces of flesh off the dying country.”

“Pawleeeeze!” Dean volleys. “Aren’t we a slight bit melodramatic here Lysie?”

“Aren’t we a slight bit insensitive here?” Matt mocks. It’s the first we’ve heard from him since the beginning.

“Look, Dean says, switching into coach mode. I can visualize him with one knee down on a hardwood floor diagramming basketball plays with his finger, his players huddled around him.  “Char, you were a high level officer with a powerful bank for many years. Don’t you think you learned a few things in that illustrious career you can use as your lifeboat to get you back to a good place?”

“Of course, but on one’s hiring, especially at my level.”

“Are you hiring, Char?”

“What do you mean?”

“Are you hiring? Just what I said. Hire yourself. Go home and make a list of all the things you  would have done differently when your bank got in to trouble if you’d been the CEO. Make a list of all the skills you’ve developed as a result of working there. Make a list of all the things people will need in the next few months because your bank isn’t there. Hopefully in one of those lists, you’ll find your business plan, and you’ll have your lifeboat. Char K, Inc. The next Microsoft or Google? Maybe. Maybe not. But at least the next good ride for you, and this time you will be the one who will control your own retirement, and everything else about your life. You’ll look back on this day and say the pink slip is the most important piece of paper you ever received. Quite often what we think is the end of the world is really the beginning of a great adventure, if you’re open to see the possibilities.”

“Wow!” I said, in awe. And, again, “Wow!”

I knew Cousin Dean was smart, but he sounds almost inspired. He sounds almost like—Robert Kyosaki or Stephen Covey or someone like that. Or… John McCain. But as he said, on that point at least, McCain was right, and he was unfairly punished for making the statement. Fundamentals do not involve daily fluctuations. They are deeply rooted foundations, infrastructure, the platform on which economies rise and fall, and investors, businesses, workers and consumers with them. They are the shelter in the basement that everyone retreats to when the siren sounds.

But there is one more fact about Dean. Once he gets wound up, he doesn’t know when to quit. And Dean was on a roll.

“Now Char, has one problem. She lost her job. But the rest of you—“ Tone implying that the rest of us (and I knew he didn’t mean me) were the ones with even bigger problems.

“What?” Matt is defensive, he seems to sense he’s about to be skewered.

“Shame on you for laying off your loyal employees. Those guys—the ones who’ve been there the longest, worked the hardest, busted their be-hinds for you every day for years and years, are the people who will keep your business from failing, who will help you find a way to make it work, maybe even work better and smarter, until this whole thing settles out. I want you to get up from this table right now and invite them over for a meal (don’t you like the way he invited them to my table to eat my food—that’s Deanie) and then tell them they all have their jobs back and you’re paying them for the time they’ve been home getting an ulcer.”

From the look on Matt’s face, it was obvious Dean had hit a nerve.

“Easy for you to say,” everyone said in unison, except me of course, and Matt, who was speechless. But he ignored them. He was on a roll.

“And you two,” he said, looking at Emily and Jan. What’s your problem? It’s not your crisis. Jan, you still have your big regional manager job. Emily, your husband still has his job. Yeah, you’ve been back and forth about the house, but that will work itself out too if you just stop feeling like helpless victims and get positive.”

“Positive?” Emily challenges. You mean take your little Norman Vincent Peale pill.” Emily is way too young to have seen that routine on the old show, “Laugh In,” when it was in prime time, but she must have seen it on TV Land.

“I mean, ‘The Law of Attraction,’ you know, from the book ‘The Secret.’”

“Same difference.”

“But it’s still true.” You guys go to church-- you do still go to church, don’t you?-- You know what Jesus said. “Faith the size of a grain of mustard can move a mountain. Fear—the kind of fear that prompted the guy with one talent to bury his money under his mattress—will cost you the one thing you most fear losing.”

“Wow!” I said again. From Stephen Covey to Oral Roberts, I was thinking. The Miracle man. Dean, lay your hand on me. I didn’t know he had it in him.

“And you, Jan? Why are you cutting back? What makes you think that by not doing the things you normally do—going to movies, shopping, buying nice gifts—that you’ll be any better off in the long run if the economy completely collapses? Money is finite. Wealth is limitless. That’s what people don’t get.

If you add up all the money you save by denying yourself your normal lifestyle, how many more months do you keep the sheriff at bay? One, two maybe, before they foreclose on you anyway? Will it make you any more comfortable when you’re living under a bridge that you suffered for months denying yourself things, keeping money out of the economy, to delay your eviction for two months. What’s two months worth now that you’re under the bridge? On the other hand, what if you didn’t cut back? Would you still be in your house? It’s a domino effect.

Other people start having problems and we start to freak out that it could happen to us. Well, of course it could happen to us. A meteor struck Alberta the other day. That could happen here too. Anybody buying meteor insurance?”

Dean was humming. A pink aura started to form a neon border around his profile. “You want to know what is more likely to happen than you spending too much now and having to live under a bridge a couple of extra months than you would have if you’d saved every dime, when everything is gone?”

“Enlighten me.” She said again, double the acidity.

“I hope I can enlighten you! Seriously!” He took a breath. Wiped a speck of gravy off his cheek. “Listen. What’s bringing down the ship is that everyone has snuck their hidden fortune onto the boat in their luggage and we’ve exceeded the weight limits. What you horde will sink the ship. Or let’s try a different analogy. Think of money as being like food. If you save it too long, you can’t eat it before it spoils. Then it’s worthless. On the other hand, if you eat as much as you can, and share the rest, lots more people eat, and no food is wasted and then even the waste from your food—how about that gross pun, do you like it?—Then even the waste from your food fertilizes the ground and creates more food. Wealth begets wealth. Food spawns food. Hording ships sinks and spoils vegetables. You’ve got to remember the difference between money and wealth. Wealth is energy. Money is fuel for the engine that creates the energy. Think of it another way. If your gas tank is empty it doesn’t do you any good to save the gas you have in case you might need it tomorrow. You need to put it in the engine today so you can drive the car to a place where you can buy more gas, or drill for it, or-- you know what I mean.”

“So you’re Bush. The economy stinks. Go to the mall!” Jan accuses.

“Basically, yeah. Counterintuitive? Sure. But what else is counterintuitive? Which way do you turn in a skid when you’re driving in snow, assuming you have rear wheel drive like everyone did a generation ago? You turn into the skid. Do you know how hard that is for people to get used to? Until you do it once and you realize that by turning into the skid, your car righted itself. That small experience stays with you for life, trumps your reflex to steer out of the skid. Like steering into a skid, we have to spend our way out of any economic crisis. The real crisis, even in the Great Depression, was and is that people who had jobs, businesses, money—people who could have kept spending, and keeping other businesses going, and other people working—stopped. Then money dried up. Wealth evaporated. It wasn’t really an economic crisis, even then, never is, because—“

“The fundamentals of the economy are strong,” I said.

“Exactly, Johnnie.”  “It’s the psychology of the economy that gets screwed up.”            
 
“Easy for you to say,” everyone said again, in unison, except me of course, again. And I couldn’t believe they still didn’t get it. I think they didn’t want to get it. It was a lot easier to whine, feel helpless, be a victim, rather than get up and start the next project, or keep that employee, or go to the movie no matter what. And it is so easy to forget that when we who still have jobs and businesses and aren’t broke, decide to cut back on movies and dining out and shopping, we take jobs and businesses and money away from those we used to support. But once again, Dean turned it right back on them.  

“Yes, it is easy for me to say. How do you think I learned all this?”

Wow. He had a point there. How soon we forget.

About ten years ago it was Dean who got the pink slip. Everyone was very worried about him. We were especially worried because he didn’t seem very upset. We thought he was depressed, maybe even delusional. He wasn’t out looking for a job, didn’t even file for unemployment. He was home working on his computer all day everyday doing something. His wife said he didn’t talk much, wouldn’t come out of the room except to sleep and shower. But then in a couple of months, he invited us all over to celebrate the launching of his new business. It was a website. A what? A virtual company. A what?  An identity-theft service company? Say what?

Sounded like a horrible idea. But Dean had worked for a big bank. He knew what happened when people had their identity stolen. He also knew a fair amount about how it was done and why it worked so well. And how to fix it. And… a star is born. A company created. Wealth, not only for Dean but his many employees, and the thousands of people who are wealthier because of benefiting from his service.

“Yep. Thank God for my pink slip,” he said, leaning back, wiping Beef gravy off his lower lip with one of my silk napkins. “Thank God for economic crises.”