"The Wrong Way"

At a recent party, I overheard an exchange that underscored for me the stupidity of emulating the wealthy. One man at the party was preparing a cup of coffee. As he poured in the sugar and creamer, he turned to the rest of us and said, "A friend from England told me this--to put the cream and sugar in the cup first, and then pour in the coffee. The motion of the pouring coffee stirs up the cream and sugar, thus mixing the separate elements. Then you don't need to use one of those wasteful wooden stirrers to mix the cream and sugar."

He then looked across the room at a British man who was present and added, "I don't know if this is a class thing or not, but it certainly makes ecological sense."

The British man smirked and said, "You've done it the wrong way. It is a class thing," suggesting that my friend's way of stirring coffee was a lower-class thing to do.

Using the motion of the liquid being poured into a cup to mix the sugar and cream makes a great deal of pragmatic sense. Doing so eliminates the use of wooden stirrers, saves more trees, and reduces garbage. It eliminates the use of plastic spoons, a choice which also leads to more environmental friendly consequences. Yet we may shrink from this pragmatic choice because we fear that doing so will label us as "low-class."

This exchange prompted me to think of other choices we make because we do not want to be seen as low class, because we want to emulate the wealthy. Think of our lawns, for instance. Suburban Americans are in love with broad expanses of bright green, trimmed, and weedless lawns. Why? Because they perceive the lawn as an expression of their wealth, like those broad expansions of English grounds. The neatly trimmed lawns are meant to emulate the English squire or duke, someone rich enough to have large amounts of land remain untilled, fallow. And so Americans pour fertilizer onto their lawns to make the grass grow and then cut the grass with gas-powered mowers to keep it trimmed and neat. They pour herbicides on their lawns to kill the dandelions and bunch grass. Those herbicides and fertilizers get washed away by rain and infiltrate the groundwater and nearby streams and rivers, with negative environmental consequences. To maintain that green expanse, people rake the leaves from their lawns, place those leaves in bags for garbage pick up. The lawn waste goes to the landfill instead of decomposing and adding nutrients to the soil. Such "de-nuded" lawns require more watering. And so it goes.

A neighbor told me that her father didn't garden because he thought that it was low class; only the rural and needy garden. The wealthy buy what they need and want; only the lower classes dirty their hands. We see similar attitudes in the Wall Street tycoons that have helped bring our country to an economic meltdown. Rick Santelli can scream on television that poor homeowners who are facing foreclosure are the cause of our nation's troubles--but surely we know better. Yes, many folks were dazzled by the opportunities to own what they could not really afford (again, emulating the wealthy--and following the advice of leaders who told the public to "go shopping"), but those Wall Street tycoons are more to blame. They bundled together toxic mortgage-backed securities, thinking that they could make oodles of money on these iffy assets. And now we all have to pay the piper. We've emulated the wealthy to the detriment of the environment and of our society. This is the "wrong way."