Let Us Be Citizens Instead of Foreclosed Consumers

Mother Davis sits with her mouth open as she writes,

The problem with the right wing approach to dealing with the problem of home foreclosures was summarized in a headline on the Bush Administration’s FirstGov site: Foreclosure Resources for Consumers.

Foreclosure resources for consumers? How are people going through the foreclosure of their houses consumers? What are they consuming?

Oh, the people who are swooping in like vultures to profit from the sale of foreclosed houses, they’re consumers, all right, but I don’t think that those consumers need the help of the federal government.

The trouble is that under the leadership of right wing Republicans and Democrats, the federal government has come to view American citizens and American workers as American consumers. Americans aren’t valued any more for their participation in their communities, and their involvement in the democratic process. They aren’t even valued for their work.

The role of Americans who live outside the world of the right wing’s economic elites has been reduced to that of consumption. Whenever the nation goes through a crisis, we’re told that the most important contribution we can make is to go out and spend money.

In the right wing’s view of the world, the biggest problem with the current recession and home foreclosure crisis is that Americans don’t have as much money to spend as they used to have, and so are not as easily able to the wealth of corporations and the wealthy few who control them.

It’s even worse that the American people have literally bought into the idea that they are primarily consumers. We don’t think of ourselves as citizens or workers. We think about what we can buy. The problem isn’t just with the economic elites. It’s with the rest of us too, and the way that we have accepted the passive role that the economic elites have defined for us.

We are responsible for the way we live. If enough Americans stop living as consumers, and start living as citizens and workers, then the people who have maneuvered their way into leadership over us will have to start treating us as citizens and workers ought to be treated. Instead of thinking about new ways to buy things, our nation might start thinking about new ways to invest in our society, so that we can live sustainably, and not keep cycling downward from bust to bust, hoping against reason that we’ll get lucky again and hit a boom without working to make it happen.

Grinding her teeth as her mouth closes,
Mother Davis