By Jon Berry
I DON'T KNOW ABOUT YOU, BUT I'VE FOUND IT HARD TO NOT be distracted by this recession. As the housing and stock markets have crashed and unemployment has gone up, I've thrown myself more into my paid job. I've worked longer hours, spent more time traveling, and devoted more of my non-working hours to thinking about work. I've put more hours into money as well, paying down our credit-card debt, staying on top of bills, and thinking about our finances.
But it’s increasingly dawning on me that this effort has not
made me happier. It’s made me put off things I want to do at this stage of my
life. Keeping up this blog, for one. (Yes, the irony of work standing in
the way of writing on work and spirituality has not been lost on me – insight trail, indeed!)
Similarly, for the past month, an application for a Masters of Divinity program has been sitting on my bookshelf, while I’ve been wondering if I really should pursue a graduate degree if I haven’t worked out all the details about how to pay for it.
A little prudence is a good thing. But, unchecked, it can be a wall of worry separating us from the life we can live.
Lately I’ve been finding inspiration from Hard Times, Studs Terkel’s book of interviews with survivors of the Great Depression. Where the mainstream media has lately been nibbling at the edges of lessons from past downturns – focusing
on the Depression’s consumer lessons (the joy of thrift, darning socks,
vegetable gardens, thrift stores, etc.) – Terkel’s subjects chronicle larger,
deeper lessons. Here are four:
Hard times open new
worlds. In addition to devastation and deprivation, many of the people interviewed by Terkel (photo) look back on the Depression as a time that opened them up to different
ways of looking at the world, and changed them for the better. One, Peggy
Terry, took off hitchhiking through the Southwest with her husband – while
pregnant. She found that people “were really nice.” People fed them. They
offered them places to stay. As they traveled on, she found that people who
she’d thought were different from her, in fact, weren’t so different. And she found herself
questioning the way things were in this country – wondering, for instance, why Franklin Roosevelt had so
many cuff links, “with rubies and precious stones,” when so many went hungry,
“the first time I remember ever wondering why.” Decades later, she remained
sympathetic to outsiders, even to those burning down buildings in the urban
unrest of the 1960s. “You get law and order when people are allowed to be
decent human beings.”
Hard times connect us to higher truths. One of the most amazing stories in Hard Times is Claude Williams, a Southern preacher. Taking as his text “Go into the world and preach the gospel to every nation,” Williams decided it was his calling to welcome everyone to his church, regardless of race or ethnicity. He was promptly fired. He started preaching in black churches and in coal-mining towns; he helped the miners organize and win a strike. He was beaten by deputies (“my real induction”) and defrocked by his mainline, traditional church (prompting him to seek ordination in an African-American church) – and converted hundreds to his causes.
He took inspiration from a controversial source: the Bible. He saw the Bible as “a workingman’s
book.” “The prophets – Moses, Amos, Isaiah, the Son of Man, Old Testament and
New – you’ll find they were fighting for justice and freedom,” he tells Terkel.
“On the other side, you find the Pharaohs, the Pilates, the Herods, and the
people in the summer houses and the winter houses.” He took “the very book”
that conservatives were using “and turned the guns the other way, as it were,”
arguing that “Good News is only good when it feeds the poor” and that “true
religion” works for “the fraternity of all people.”
Hard times force issues. Seeing
the terrible suffering and contradictions of the Great Depression – children
suffering from rickets, while companies were pouring milk into gutters – was,
for Virginia Durr (photo), seeing “a blinding light, like Saul on the road to
Damascus.” A self-described “conformist, well-off Southern snob,” she
was moved to shame and cajole dairy companies to open their dispensaries to the poor. She
went on to be a pioneer in abolishing the poll tax. Durr describes the
Depression dividing the country into two kinds of people. “The great majority,”
she says, came to think money is “the most important thing in the world. Get
yours. And get it for your children. Nothing else matters.” Anything to keep
“that stark terror” of having nothing from recurring. But, she adds, “there was
a small number of people who felt the whole system was lousy” and “you have to
change it,” to make it “responsive to people’s needs.”
Hard times are not insurmountable. For all those, like myself, who feel a bit stuck in our tracks, the stories in Hard Times, taken together, seem to carry a clear message to go ahead and lead our life. Get on with what's important, get on with living. People figured out how to carry on through all kinds of obstacles in the Depression. Communities literally ran out of money. Goodyear Rubber and Tire paid its workers in scrip; the local merchants, respectful of the company’s place in the community, accepted the scrip as payment. People learned to barter goods and services. While some refused to help others – seeing it as an affront to the country’s individualist ethic – many helped in smaller ways. Jimmy McPartland, a jazz musician, describes the musicians’ ethic of giving money to fellow musicians when they were running low. His peers had little patience with Wall Street big shots who felt they lost everything when they lost their money. “We used to say to each other: Are they nuts? What is money? The important thing is life and living and enjoying life…You’re still livin’, aren’t ya? [You] can start over.”
***
More about Studs Terkel, including tapes of some of his
interviews, is available through the
http://www.studsterkel.org/index.html
To buy a copy of Hard Times, click here:
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