9. Not Buying It

I just finished Not Buying It by Judith Levine. It is an extremely well-written and subtly thought-provoking book. She and her husband gave up shopping for a year except for "necessities". The book raises a lot of questions, but in a quiet way. Levine doesn't shout the message but rather narrates it.

Here's an excerpt that you don't have to ski to be able to relate to:

"February 26

Another ski-related trouble offers another clue about consumption.

Paul [Levine's husband]has meetings in Montpelier today. He gets up early and before leaving removes my skis from his car and puts them into mine, so I can go out when I'm finished working. Then he drives off with the wax kit in his car.

At two, I am ready to get up from my desk. I put on my ski clothes, warm up the car. Soon, I'm on my way to the Craftsbury Sports Center, widely regarded as the best place for cross-country skiing in the Northeast, and I'm psyched. Halfway there, this time with my good waxable skis, it occurs to me that I didn't see the wax kit in the back of the car. I pull to the side of the road, open the hatchback, riffle through the bag. I'm right. I get behind the wheel again. Traversing some of the most breathtaking landscape in the northeastern United States, I am locked in a windowless cell of anxiety.

Here's what I'm worried about: "I'm going to have to beg a few swipes of wax from the guy in the warming hut. 'Can I borrow...' 'May I have...' 'You see, Paul drove away with...' 'I'm doing this project and...' I devise various strategies, compose and rehearse appropriate lines. I don't want to sound too demanding, but I don't want to be too nonchalant, either. A note of apology might be appropriate, but abjectness is over the top. Basically, I want to ask for help in such a way as to prevent anyone from noticing I'm asking.

I shouldn't fret. The people who work at hte center are friendly. I ski practically every day; they know me. But I am fretting. They are friendly, they know me, but that doesn't mean they are my friends. They are employees of business, and I am a customer. Customers buy things. It's unfair to ask them to break the rules for me, a friendly person they know, who is not really a friend. The twenty-five-minute trip takes about twenty-five hours. Every one hundred yards I consider turning around and going back home.

This feeling throws me back twenty-five years, to my late twenties. I had come out of college with a $5,000 government-guaranteed National Defense Student Loan and was advised by numerous friends adn former NDSL recipients that no one had ever paid back one of those loans. For two years I didn't. Then Ronald Reagan was elected and sold the debt to Citibank. The bank promptly jacked the interest to the going rate and got serious about collecting, but try as they did, they couldn't manage to collect from me. This was the era before credit companies discovdered that bad debtors are (for the companies' profits) good debtors. Until I paid off the loan and gave the banks a decent interval to reconsider me for a credit card, I could not buy a plane ticket, rent a car, reserve a hotel room, or purchase a winter coat without greenbacks on the counter. I had few greenbacks, so I bought almost nothing. On the rare occasion I traveled, I slept on couches and got around by thumb.

On one such trip, to California in 1975, as I stood on a roadside outside Los Angeles, a motorist informed me of the rung on the American social hierarchy where my credit-unworthy ass had landed. He slowed down as he came close to me. I thought he was going to pick me up. Instead he rolled down his window and practically spat. "Hey, you!" Why don't you get your own goddamn car?"

Approaching the hut at the ski center, I am again my hitchhiking, pad-crashing, cash-economy self, about to rely on the kindness of strangers--or collide with their unkindness. And then I realize it's not ski wax that I want, not even the convenience of having the ski wax ready to use.

What I want is autonomy, the sine qua non of Western commerical citizenship. To be creditworthy is to be worthy of respect. To buy is to be an adult. A person without money is a child, and all children are beggars.

What to do now? My friend Debbie, an editor, has recommended staying undercover, employing a 'don't buy, don't tell' policy. 'If you're a journalist writing about homelessness and you dress in rags and don't bathe for a week but tell everyone "I'm writing about the homeless," people will treat you like a journalist.' When Paul and I tell our friends that we are not going out to dinner because of our yearlong project, they congratulate us. 'If you dress in rags and don't bathe and keep your mouth shut,' Debbie continued, 'people will treat you like a homeless person. You might learn a little about what it's like to be homeless.'

Inside the hut, a hot fire burning. Business is slow and Nick is alone behind the counter. Though an agressive racer, off the trail this lanky young Buddhist woudl be flat on the floor were he any more laid back. His demeanor gives me courage. 'Um, could I borrow a little blue wax, just a few swipes?' I ask, assuming the identity of a person who has arrived at a ski center without ski wax and without money.

Nick smiles. 'Borrow it? You can have it.' He takes the ski, bites the plastic cap off a stick of wax, and starts applying it himself.

As I glide down the long hill at the start of Ruthie's Run, I realize that while envy may mobilize consumer desire, it's not the things other people have that one necessarily envies. I mean, how many people actually like Rolex watches? What we want from things is what we want from other people, and from ourselves--whatever it is we want. I want to be a strong, competent athlete, one of the atletic crowd...

Not buying it has forced Paul and me to feel vulnerable and to ask for help, an almost un-American behavior. But the ability to ask for help might be a good skill to cultivate. Today I asked, and got service and a smile. As I ski up the next long hill, I tell myself that what I need is some non-consumer confidence."

From later in the year: "I want something that religions offer in abundance: the permission to desire wildly, to want the biggest stuff--communion, transcendence, joy, and a freedom that has nothing to do with a choice of checking accounts or E-Z access to anything."