An Event in the Rain

So there we were, maybe a hundred soggy people standing in the rain, and yes, quite a few of our number had driven their cars to get there, and we were doing this media event about trying to get the attention of those who might do something about the amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere.

There was a reporter there, getting soggy with us. He asked me why we were doing it. Not being one of the organizers, I wondered if I should say anything. But, well, I was the Unitarian Universalist minister on the scene, so maybe... I mumbled something about getting together with other groups all over the world and something about how if we let the Earth become a place where humans really couldn't live, it would be something even a Unitarian Universalist could call a sin.

I wasn't at all sure. This was a kind of feel-good event (even though we were getting miserably wet, the group was really having a good time together) with content that was easy to love, no opponents anywhere in sight, an event that was asking us to do nothing but show up and stand around looking numerous --we actually spelled out the numbers 350, and a photographer climbed the fire department's ladder truck to take our picture and send it to the worldwide event headquarters.

I actually was proud of the Belfast congregation of Unitarian Universalists. The main organizer of the event was one of them. The singing group, the "Raging Grannies" had members from the congregation, the group that walked over from the other side of town with a great big drum under a beach umbrella included congregation members, the crowd was thick with us. Without the UU congregation, the event would have been much smaller. Maybe it would not have happened.

And on reflection, I'm sure it really did matter. It's hard to get beyond the generally pretty anemic things we do as individuals in the midst of a culture of waste, and it's hard to get people to be serious about the bigger things. We feel stronger now. We're part of a larger movement that is maybe going to get the attention of people with power around the world, to help them believe that people really care to save the planet. We may not know how, but we need their help to get everyone to be serious about this. Because it really would be a sin. Even for a Unitarian Universalist. Maybe especially for a Unitarian Universalist.

If Consumer Spending Doesn't, What Will?

There was more on the news about how they expect the recovery to be "jobless", how employment will lag behind other indicators, and we'll have slow, slow growth for the next several years. Consumer spending, they say, is not bounding back robustly -- and why should it, since we were spending way too much and borrowing to make it happen and pretending house prices would never go down and we really, really, don't want to go back to that again.

Indeed, it's time to save, not time to spend, because so many of us are facing the uncertainty of an overstressed Social Security system with underprepared portfolios. Consumer spending is going to have to take a back seat to consumer saving.

So, the economy is not going to be recovering the way it has after the last several recessions. But it could still recover faster than they think. It could be about investment. And it could be about ending the violence of extreme poverty around the world. It could be about building some sort of post-capitalist system that made it possible for family incomes and consumption to rise around the world and didn't require the families of the United States to overextend themselves to keep everything working. Where is the creative thinking that once made American capitalism famous?

If the folks who make loans keep looking in the same places for their business, we'll just end up in the same old mess we were in the last time, only later. Let's do something different!