Hard times

Last update: November 5, 2008 - 7:15 PM

A slug of forced austerity

The day I got my first paycheck in my first post-college job, I walked into my old campus saloon, leaned on the bar and ordered a Heineken.

That was 20 years ago. In a way, I've been a Heineken man ever since. That is, though I've never known wealth in my working life, there has always been money for Heineken. Live that way long enough, and you begin to think that the easy availability of Heineken is the natural order of things.

My father, he drinks whatever's on sale and doesn't care. That's his way. He was a child of the Great Depression. I have a lot of conversations these days involving the word "depression."

In my back yard the other night, we sat by the fire, several of us, talking about what we'd do if hard times came and realizing that we have no idea, no idea at all. None of us has serious debt, but we confessed that we'd spent these fat years drinking too much Heineken and saving too little.

Sometimes you get to thinking that a stiff slug of forced austerity might be good for us all. It would compel us to become more self-reliant, to focus more on our families and communities, and to cultivate simplicity. I'm susceptible to this fantasy, but then I remember how my grandfather had to be away from his wife and kids for four grueling years on the road, trying to make a living.

Besides, sudden shattering poverty and the subsequent social unraveling in Weimar Germany didn't work out so great for the world, did it? Show of hands: Who's confident that contemporary America, which lacks the social cohesion the nation had in the 1930s, would be able to pull together as it did during the Great Depression?

Still, would it be such a bad thing to learn to live more frugally? In her must-read new book, "Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front," Sharon Astyk says that we have no choice but to live a radically more simple life -- and she shows how. This doesn't mean embracing a freakish level of austerity; it just means learning to want less and to need less. As she writes on her blog:

"In 1945 we used 80 percent less energy per household than we do now. Your parents and grandparents lived that way -- they heated the rooms they used most often and closed off the other ones, wore sweaters and walked more than they drove. They took the bus. They ate less meat."

Astyk was responding to an article that had implicitly raised questions about the sanity of her and her upstate New York farm family, given their frugal lifestyle. Meanwhile, the government is trying to restart an economy blown to bits by debt by encouraging Americans drowning in debt to resume spending money that they don't have. You tell me: Who's crazy here?

ROD DREHER, DALLAS MORNING NEWS

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