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Commentary
GEN-X RISING: Hope in midst of economic chaos Andrew C. Thompson, Oct 16, 2008
By Andrew C. Thompson UMR Columnist
Our world is consumed by news of mortgage crises, financial meltdowns and breathtaking drops in the stock market’s Dow Jones, S&P 500 and Nasdaq indices.
Americans ask, “Who will save us from this trouble?” As the ripple effects from the economic turmoil spread across the globe, citizens of other countries must surely be asking the same question.
Our government’s answer is coming in the form of a $700-billion bailout of financial institutions, designed to arrest the current financial crisis and ensure that there is enough liquidity in the banking sector to keep the economy moving.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, passed by Congress and signed by President Bush, “grants the Treasury secretary unprecedented authority to buy up to $700 billion of troubled assets from ailing financial institutions in an effort to stave off more bankruptcies and provide cash for new loans to ease the credit market freeze-up.”
Even political debate over the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq now takes a backseat to the nation’s economic woes. When the two presidential candidates are asked about them, it is no longer about the simple rightness or wrongness of the American military’s presence. Now such questions take on the more pragmatic tones of why we should be spending such considerable resources when the domestic economy is in a tailspin.
Such news spells dread for United Methodists who are sure to be touched by the crisis.
Of course, middle-class Americans have an almost pathological fear of letting their neighbors know when they are in financial difficulty. Because we are raised with the cultural myth of self-sufficiency—the idea that everyone should ultimately be able to fend for himself—the last thing we want the person sitting next to us in the pew to know is that we are facing hard times.
But in the months ahead there may be a whole lot of us facing hard times. While no one looks forward to such difficulties as the loss of jobs and the shrinking of 401(k) plans, there remains the hope that Christians will use the current situation as a way to understand their fundamental connection to one another.
That is, our myths of self-reliance could be replaced by the gospel call to mutual love and support.
The powerful 2007 documentary, God Grew Tired of Us, focuses on the Lost Boys of Sudan, over 20,000 refugees from the Sudanese civil war who lived for years in camps along the Ethiopian and Kenyan borders. Eventually, several thousand of the Lost Boys were invited to emigrate to the U.S.
The film follows the lives of several of these young men as they resettle in U.S. cities and adapt to a new culture. The filmmakers chronicle their lives as they get used to such conveniences as flushing toilets, electric lights and grocery stores. Then the filmmakers return a year later to see how the Sudanese men have coped with their new environment.
All of them seem happy to be living in America. But they also exhibit a certain amount of anxiety over a way of life that is so different from the one they knew in Africa. In particular, the men seem perplexed at the extreme individualism of Americans, who spend almost all their time working and so little of it enjoying community with one another.
“It’s difficult here in America,” one of the refugees says into the camera. “Every one has different work schedules; they come and go at different times. There is no time for family.”
“In the United States, people are not friendly,” reports another. “No one talks to anyone on the street. You cannot go to the house of someone you don’t know [for help] even if you are all Americans.”
The Lost Boys—who are all Christian, by the way—may prove prophetic in the midst of the current economic hardship. As we discover that we really can’t make it on our own, we may find that our cherished American self-sufficiency has to give way to something better: a Christian ethic of love, support, and mutual care.
