A Revolution of Value

Thanksgiving is behind us, and we are now fully in the holiday season. Americans are shopping. Startling numbers have been reported about online spending on Black Friday. Over ten billion dollars paid out and, at one point, between the hours of 10am and 2pm, we spent over $11 million online every minute. Obscene.

I guess the “economic anxiety” that drove so many Americans to vote for Donald Trump has subsided since his election. So much for the problem of inflation and the like. Immigration still looms. Mass deportations shadow public debate. But Americans are doing what we do: shop.

It is a feature of this society where consumption overdetermines deeds and hides the emptiness that threatens this place. We acquire things that promise us meaning, but those material things often trap us in the illusion of the wonderful life. We obsess over a fairy tale, as Eugene O’Neil noted, that keeps us looking “for a magic door and a lost kingdom of peace.” Shop. And keep shopping. That’s the key, we are told.

Over the next weeks we will be inundated with commercials that entice us to step away from reality, to leave behind our loneliness, and spend money. And I suspect Americans will spend at historic levels, as we did on Black Friday, to conceal our torment.

No one in this place escapes. Plutus reigns. Mammon suffocates. The anarchy of individual profit. As we all work on our shopping lists.

When I think about how loveless America, U.S.A., feels in this holiday season, I’m reminded of something I wrote in Democracy in Black. There I called for “a revolution of value.” That, if we are committed to the idea of American democracy, and by some twisted fate I am, we must seek to uproot ways of seeing and living that have made this country so shallow and fearful.

A revolution of value entails a change in how we view what matters to us as Americans. We must put forward a more expansive understanding of American democracy. This will involve sacrificing the comfort of national innocence and the willful blindness that comes with it.

We will have to admit that something about the way we see the world has gone out of whack. People profit from the incarceration of millions (and the cruelty of mass deportations). Corporations make money off the sick. An obscene number of our children live in poverty and in low-income families. And the rich keep getting richer, distorting democratic outcomes with their outsized influence, and stoking resentments as a cover for their greed.

It’s as if we’ve tossed aside any pretense of having a robust idea of the public good, because some are afraid (and some want us to be afraid) that Black people or immigrants or Muslims or trans people or some other group will threaten the standing of white people. That fear, along with greed and selfishness, has allowed us to let the country fall apart at the seams.

The sad thing is, we had a chance. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. urged the nation to undergo a revolution of values. We needed to shift, he said, from “a thing-oriented society” to “a person-oriented society,” to see that the gap between the rich and the poor reflected an economic order that stripped millions of people of their ability to even imagine a decent living, and to understand that war (and the monies used to execute it) put us on the road to “spiritual death.”

A revolution of value would challenge the worshippers of Plutus and Mammon, would demote our interests in material toys, while honoring the sanctity of life and the dignity of work. As Dr. King put it, “When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the great triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

We have to upend our current way of valuing the world and the people in it. Shopping is not the answer to the hardening of the American heart. It never has been. Spending money won’t allay our fears and loneliness; its comfort is fleeting. The debt lingers.

Instead, this holiday season, let us dare to imagine a different way of seeing and living in this world. What might it mean to really embrace love and grace as a guiding ethic? What would it look like to affirm the dignity and standing of every human being? To finally rid the country of “niggers” and the “white people” who need them? To imagine a place where money matters little in the quality of the life lived? And what will it take from each of us to make such a world a reality? A Revolution of Value.

Think about it as you make your shopping lists. I am.