Comfort as Privilege

One impression I carry with me from childhood is of Cybill Shepherd swiveling around in a futuristic egg chair offering a defiant answer to a question that may or may not have been articulated in the hair color commercial: "Because I'm worth it." I would say that statement irritated me as a kid, probably because, without realizing it as such, I did not feel included in it. And I was underage for the target audience. To kids we market via basic, nearly primal desires for things like power, speed and sugar. To adults are added more esoteric and engineered desires curated by lifetimes of receiving all kinds of messages to the point where they feel unartificial and ineluctible. One that has been on my mind is the notion that to treat yourself by buying something is a virtuous act. Consider the pride with which a working mother might announce that she had her nails done, or how a college-age child might lecture a parent on how they need to work less and golf more, or how a department or office might tell its administrative assistant that she needed to take a day off to spend the gift certificate they pooled for at the spa. Work is the premise, or thesis, and the spa is the antithesis. The synthesis is robust capitalism in which workers self-medicate with consumption. I like the spa as much as the next person, but I'm very aware that I can't afford to go to one unless I'm working enough to make it seem much more necessary.

But I've been thinking less about how work necessitates consumption than about what kinds of consumption are open to what kinds of people. Plenty of people work long hours, but not all of them are well-remunerated for it. A family of four with two parents working 40-hour a week at minimum-wage jobs would earn about $2,550 a month, qualifying them for food stamps (the monthly cut-off is $2,668).  Yet I know many people, including Dan and me, who are able between them to work less than two full-time jobs and still exceed the SNAP threshold by a large margin. Those people can not only afford to pay for food from their income, but they can afford a much broader array of "treats" to add a certain level of comfort to their lives. Dan and I live pretty frugally, and there are many non-necessities we forego, such as tobacco, dining out frequently, driving new or expensive cars, clothes, or shoes, or living in a big apartment. If we become more affluent in the future, we will no doubt partake of more of those non-necessities, beginning with a living space that has two bathrooms and a dishwasher. Some of the non-necessities we do afford ourselves we would consider treats, like going out to dinner occasionally, or international vacations; others, like purchasing a farm share and more sustainably-raised meats, don't really confer any special treat sensation, but they are consumption choices we make to gratify our sense of justice and stewardship of animals and the environment. Then there's alcohol.

Alcohol is definitely something we'd call a treat, but it's also a basic part of our diet and our social lives. To me, it's impossible to think about good food without the beverages that go with it because I expect to have them together and I enjoy them so much more together. Like a salad of beets, goat cheese, and walnuts, it's hard to say which of the two would be best without the third, and that's how I feel about most foods without wine or beer. Alcohol also is an ingredient in much of our entertainment: our favorite thing to do together is to mix a cocktail and enjoy it together while we talk or cook or both. It's difficult to write about this and feel that many readers will appreciate my attitude towards alcohol for what it is and not write me off as an alcoholic or an apologist for my own self-indulgence. I'm keenly aware that the prevailing attitudes towards alcohol in our culture are fraught in many different directions. This is a country of bingers and abstainers, and I'm not a registered dietitian telling you cheerily to have one glass of wine with dinner for the bioflavanoids. I'm saying that across the world and throughout history alcohol has been at once a more casual and more indispensible part of human culture than it is presently in the US, and I really appreciate having it as a part of my life to be infrequently, although sometimes, eschewed or overconsumed, but for the most part used the same way people have used that even less-likely demon, bread, as a basic and beloved part of each day.

Being without alcohol this week has me thinking about the notion of comfort. With all alcohol off the table, I feel distinctly bereft of this comfort, and without the option for comfort. Some of this comes from the lack of other things that foodstamps could buy: I can't have a candy or an extra apple if I feel peckish, or just to make the fun of the evening seem to "last" a little past dinner. I can't make tea in the afternoon or an extra pot of coffee if we want it. But it's mainly that the light has been going out of our dinners and their preparation because they're forced into what feels like an excessive deprivation. Thus, the biggest thing I have learned so far about what it feels like to be poor is that the poorer you are the more limited the scope of comforts you can afford is. Booze is expensive, folks, although it hasn't always been that way and it isn't that way everywhere in the world. In the fruit stores in southern Italy where I bought food for many of our blustery picnics, they sold wine from kegs decanted into reused water bottles that were cheaper than Coke. Why can I have a coke this week, or any kind of candy, but no rotgut nero d'avola?

Consider that comfortable is a euphemism for rich: why do we consider comfort so much the province of the affluent, and ridicule the poor for the imagined sushi and lobster they are all eating, but congratulate the wealthy for taking themselves out for a sixty-dollar steak that will be cooked by someone making minimum wage? Why are we forcing the poor to comfort themselves, who for damned sure need comfort no less than the affluent, with tobacco and sugar while we enjoy the heart benefits of nice wines and wild-caught fish?

I have been dubious for some time, probably since September 11, of the weird and inflated status that safety seems to hold in our society. As the country dashed off to war against unknown enemies, I felt that the most abstract conception of our own safety (the victims were already dead, as were the perpetrators [not counting the people who would develop respiratory ailments as a result of their roles in the rescue and clean up who have found it hard to get their care paid for]) was used to justify actions that seemed reckless and unjust. And whose safety did those wars promote? When you look not only at the numbers, but at who died in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is hard not to see them as the willful sacrifice of a poorer, less well-advocated-for sector of the society for the future safety of who knows whom? Safety was important in that historical moment, but not the safety of the soldiers. In an interview she did for the New York Times, Marilynn Robinson articulated very well this dubiousness I had long felt about how safety was functioning in our society: “What it comes down to — and I think this has become prominent in our culture recently — is that fear is an excuse: ‘I would like to have done something, but of course I couldn’t.’ Fear is so opportunistic that people can call on it under the slightest provocations: ‘He looked at me funny. So I shot him.’” Fear has been used as an excuse for instituting new policies and upholding others, but I would argue that it is the fear for the safety of the already safest members of our society that has motivated politics in recent years, while the least safe grow only more vulnerable in our gun-ridden world of widening income inequality. The poor are poorer, the rich more scared, and everyone has greater access to guns, especially children. We know, too, that the poor are not only the most likely to encounter physical violence, but to live in the areas most prone to noise, air and land pollution, the most susceptible to the ravages of natural disasters, and with the least access to quality education and decently-priced, well-stocked grocery stores.
The bottom line is that the amount of money we have is not related to our virtue, our worthiness as human beings, or how much right we have to the basics of human survival or to the unnecessary "treats" that make life livable, whether they be the wine that makes a meal really good, the martini at the end of the work week, or a well-founded sense of personal security when we eat our meals, breathe our air, leave our homes, or do our jobs. I'll be thinking of that during the next debate in which rich and thickly-sponsored politicians debate what the poor deserve.