There is a certain amount of responsibility that comes with freedom. Often we consider freedom in itself a virtue: “I am free to decide my own destiny.” “I have a right to free speech.” Freedom is part of the American ethos. In many ways, that has served us well, but there is a poverty inherent in freedom. This poverty is something we have a hard time identifying because being independent—free from the constraints others would put on us—is almost universally seen as good. As a nation we celebrate independence from England with great exuberance. Perhaps this reflects as much a desire to eat and party as it does a love of independence, but we party on may other occasions (birthdays, Christmas, memorial day, even Spring Break) and those rarely have quite the same kind of highlights as the flag-waving, BBQing, firework-watching kind. If we believe the rhetoric of American foreign policy, we are even in the business of making sure others don’t squelch freedom throughout the rest of the world. Officially, we are in the business of encouraging democracy and ensuring freedom worldwide. This post isn’t intended to be political, so I don’t intend to go beneath the surface of the propaganda that fuels our war machine. The point is that when independence is always right, to think of independence as creating poverty among us doesn’t make much sense. And yet, that is exactly what I want to examine. The rhetoric of freedom and independence we take for granted is an insidious and devious lie. We believe it, because we want to be free. We don’t want to be dependent. We don’t want to be bound. And yet being bound in dependence is exactly where we find freedom. So let us examine a bit more closely the poverty of independence and the wealth of dependence.
The lie of independence is that none of us is free. At least not in the way we think about freedom. We’re not free because we all bear the burden of the consequences that result from the actions of others. Often the reason that injustice is allowed to continue in the world is because we are unable or unwilling to acknowledge the part that our actions play in perpetrating the injustice. When we begin to recognize that as people it is better to be responsible for each other than to leave each other to our own devices this makes it much harder to ask those for whom we are now responsible to continue to suffer. In my early 20s, I moved to the east coast of the United States. The first 6 months I was there I found myself with very little money. I made just enough to pay rent and put gas in my car. I lived very simply. I often didn’t have enough to buy food, so I learned how to survive with less. There was a store close by where I could buy a 20-pound bag of rice for a few dollars, and that would last months. I would often live off rice for weeks at a time. About once a week I would buy some vegetables too, and that was enough. I forgot what soda tasted like because I only drank water, and when someone gave me a soda after months without, it was so sweet I couldn’t even finish the can! If my paycheck was really good, then I would treat myself to a gallon of milk. Not only do I have an unusual love for milk, but in that situation it served a double-purpose. A big glass of milk when I got home would quench my thirst and satisfy my hunger. Those of you who read this should not mistake my life for one of abject poverty or asceticism. I still socialized with friends regularly, I was able to travel, and I made a friend whose parents owned a delicious Persian restaurant nearby. She often brought me leftover vegetarian delights. If there was any point in my life when I was the most independent, this was probably it. Other than my parents giving me about $200 early on after I moved and paying the deposit on the room I rented, I didn’t even get money from other people. I was obligated to no one. Yet in the freedom that earning a meager salary gave me to come and go as I pleased, I was poor. When compared to the rest of the world I was rich even then. I owned a computer, a car, had a place to live, a TV, a phone, and an internet connection. Suddenly the simple life doesn’t look so simple. Nevertheless, in the eyes of most Americans I was poor. I was probably below the poverty line, but things worked out just fine. Besides, after those first six months I got a new job, and pretty soon thereafter had more disposable income than I’ve ever had before or since. The poverty that I experienced in that time in my life, while financial at first, was really the poverty of independence. When you’re free from obligation to anyone, you’re really a slave to yourself, and that makes things worse for everyone.
The thing about independence of the kind I experienced is it teaches you to think about yourself first. Even the most altruistic person in the world has to do this when you’re independent. If no one else is going to help you or take care of you, you have to do this yourself. And believe it or not, that takes up a lot of time! Between whatever work we do to earn money, feeding ourselves, and managing day-to-day tasks, there isn’t a whole lot of time left over to think about anyone else. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
I grew up in Los Angeles taking public transportation. My parents had cars, but they both worked, so during school breaks if I wanted to get anywhere it meant getting on the bus. If you’re like me and you took the bus in Los Angeles in the late 80s and 90s, then you learned the same thing I did: busses suck. They take forever to get anywhere. Even when you hear the logic of public transportation being more efficient it seems obscene because the busses just get stuck in the same horrible traffic as any car. The difference is, they have to stop every few blocks on top of it! Never mind if you have to transfer between lines. When I was 19 I bought my first car and it cut the commute to work from an hour and half to 15 minutes. There should be no question why we all wanted off the bus!
But things have changed a lot since then. In 2008 I went back to school to earn my degree in Global Studies. Part of that degree involves taking part in L.A. Term, and that means taking public transit everywhere you go. Being a veteran of the L.A. public transit system, I wasn’t all that excited about it, but by taking part I was amazed at how much had changed in 10 years! Sure, it still took longer than a car, but the busses ran more frequently and it gave me time to read for school and catch glimpses of the city that would have been missed on a freeway overpass. A year after doing L.A. Term, I packed my family up and took them with me on the Global Learning Term. Interestingly, this is an independent semester abroad where students complete academic fieldwork, but the entire experience is about learning how to build community outside of your everyday environment. Now several months removed from that experience, we both still desperately miss the deep feelings of community we built with our friends abroad. Part of moving overseas also means you don’t bring a car with you! This meant that for the time abroad my wife and I were raising our kids with only public transit available to us. It ended up working out fine; where we lived the bus came right outside our place 6 times an hour during the day, and 2-3 times an hour later in the evening. Sure it meant that there were times we chose not to do things because there wouldn’t be bus for us to catch, or we would have to leave an event to make sure we got a bus home in time to put the kids to bed, but even with the inconveniences that public transit can create, not ever having to strap the kids into car seats was one significant bonus!
In a society where it is normal to own a car, choosing to use public transit is a choice to become dependent on service from others. It means that the choice to travel is bound by when and where someone else has decided there is enough demand to create a route. This can present a problem for a family with young children. My wife and I have a family car, and it is our primary mode of transportation, especially when we all need to be in the same place at the same time. There are practical reasons for this. While abroad, we lived in a medieval European city. The closest bus stop to our house in L.A. is a longer walk than the entire length of the city center there! But beyond that, let’s assume for a moment one of our kids has some emergency medical problem in the middle of the night. How are we going to get to a hospital? Certainly not walk for 15 minutes to the bus, wait up to an hour for one to come because it’s during off-peak time, and then go to some strange hospital because the one we normally would have gone to isn’t on a bus route that runs in the middle of the night. No. We’ll get in our car and drive there. But what if you don’t have a car and you still have an emergency? That is where we found ourselves while abroad. My son tripped and fell in our living room and cut his face open on a glass coffee table and had to be rushed to the hospital for treatment. So how did we get there? It wasn’t on an hour-long bus ride! We called the emergency phone number and an ambulance was sent to get us. My son still talks about the ambulance ride because he was so excited that there was a bed inside that he rode in. Now in Scotland, that’s no big deal. Medical care is socialized so you don’t have to think, “how am I ever going to pay for this ambulance ride? My insurance will never cover it!” But here in the U.S., had we faced the same situation, that ER trip would have bankrupted us. So instead we own a car.
The problem with all of this is, cars are killing us. In L.A., we all complain about the traffic, but we’re not willing to give up driving. Personally, I think if you drive in this city, you shouldn’t be allowed to complain about traffic. And that goes for me too. My plan is to sell my car and upgrade to a bicycle once I have a steady job, but this blog post isn’t about transportation issues. Rather, the transportation serves to illustrate a point. If we all chose to use public transit instead of driving our cars, there would probably be a much better public transit system. And that isn’t because there would be more money being invested in transportation. It would be because we would all be personally invested in it working well! We might even be willing to fork over extra dollars from our taxes to have special transit lines that operated at regular intervals through the night to trauma centers and ER rooms in case a family had an emergency. Or better yet, we would be willing to admit that providing medical coverage for everyone in our country is better than the system we have now no matter how much it costs. We would realize we pay a higher social cost when families have to decide not to seek medical attention for their sick children because they simply can’t afford to do so, or the care they do get is so poor they might as well have stayed home. We would make sure an ambulance ride would be a sense of relief that care was being administered instead of dread that it could never be paid for. But the point of this post is not to be political. I’m no socialist. I don’t think governments are omniscient or omnipotent and exist in order to solve all of our problems. However, as people, we live in community with each other and either suffer or gain because of the actions of all of the others. This necessarily has social and political ramifications, which is why I bring them up. I use those to illustrate the point rather than to argue the merits of a particular policy. If we move back to the example of transportation, we can languish in our cars, complaining about the traffic we sit in to get to a job where we slave to make the payment for the car we couldn’t afford to buy in the first place, much less afford to fill with gas and pay for maintenance, insurance, registration and repairs. Or, we can do something different.
The point is, that whether we are willing to admit it or not, we are bound to the people around us. We aren’t really free. Our actions have consequences that resonate outwards from us and affect other people. On the one hand, I am free to make my own choices. I do have the freedom to decide how I am going to live my life. But that freedom is bound by the fact that what I choose makes a difference (positively or negatively) in the lives of others. It could be something a simple as choosing to drive my car when I could use public transit. The car is certainly more convenient, but when I choose the bus I choose community. When we choose dependence we choose community. If I only drive, I don’t know what it means to get on in the city without a car. When we choose dependence we make visible the truth that we all do life together whether we like it or not. Independence helps me live with the illusion that my actions don’t really have consequences. I get to ignore that there are other people in the world. I don’t want to know them, and I shouldn’t bother getting to know them because their business is their business. The problem with that kind of attitude is that Jesus tells us life is better in community.
Christians often talk about being saved from things. They talk about being saved from sin, or from hell, or from “the world.” The problem with this is it completely ignores the fact Jesus didn’t talk so much about saving us from things, but saving us FOR things. Jesus was in the business of teaching what the kingdom of God looks like, and that often involved what people are busy doing there. At the end of his time on earth he instructed his followers to go into the world. Paul writes in Ephesians that we are “created in Christ Jesus to do good works.” At the conclusion of John’s Revelation, he sees the vision of a city where God dwells “among the people.” and if that weren’t enough, God gave us concrete examples of what living in community is supposed to look like within the Old Testament. When Israel was given land after the Exodus an entire tribe was not allowed to own land. The Levites were to spread out among all the tribes, and the other tribes were required to provide them with physical sustenance. In return, the Levites served the other tribes by looking after the tasks associated with religious worship. Also in Old Testament law, landowners were required to leave some of their crops unharvested so those without means to produce their own food could glean from the crops of others.
The state of California places a surcharge on all metal, plastic, and glass cans or bottles. In our state it’s called CRV, short for California Redemption Value. The reason for the name is that in theory, you can take all of those items to a recycling center, and redeem the value added tax the state placed on the item. At first this was an incentive for people to recycle rather than throw those items away. But the value isn’t that much – somewhere between 5-10 cents per item. When municipal sanitation services stared providing bins for recycling, the exercise of physically taking your recyclable goods to a recycling center to redeem your few cents per item became more hassle than it was worth when you could recycle them at home. So most people throw their goods in the bin and forego the money they could have redeemed from the state. This has worked out well for California because it’s money they technically offer back to people, but which they usually refuse. However, in Los Angeles, there are now people who go around to different neighborhoods and dig through people’s recycling bins looking for bottles and cans they can redeem. I would assume most of these people are very low-income, or there is a lot more money to be made digging through other people’s garbage than I can imagine. Either way, every week there are people who visit our street to collect bottles and cans. My household is like most in that we don’t bother going to the recycling center, but after seeing the same people digging through our trash for items to redeem, we started separating out our cans and bottles into a separate bag that we put out for them to take. Sometimes they come before we’ve taken the bag outside, and then we try to run out and hand it to them. In this simple act we recognize that we can choose to be a blessing to others and it doesn’t cost us anything but the money we were choosing to forego anyway. More than anything, I like to think of this simple act as a way of saying we recognize our own ability to create or destroy community. I should make clear that we don’t have relationships with these people. They’re very busy looking for cans and bottles and don’t generally stick around to talk, but we can recognize that even in this superficial interaction we are all doing life together, in the city, and in the world. My mother-in-law once referred to the can-gatherers as “gleaners,” and it seems fitting. Not only is the CRV much like unharvested grain, but here we have the ability to offer the one thing we know we can do to help make life a little more pleasant for these people we don’t know. The challenge is to continue looking for ways to do that.
But the cost of not doing so leads me back to the poverty of independence. Independence means we all lose. When it’s bottles and cans, I lose the CRV and the others lose time digging in my recycle bin. When it’s a car it means that everyone stuck in traffic loses, the environment loses, and those who don’t have the means to own a car lose because transit service will remain inferior as long as massive portions of the population remain uninvested. When it’s medical care, we all lose because some can afford it, some cannot, and people suffer and die.
When we choose independence we actually choose poverty. We choose freedom, but we’re never really free. We choose a lie. The Christian faith teaches us that God is community (the Trinity). The Biblical text reminds us that people exist in community and our actions have grave consequences for others whether we know it or not (reference Genesis 3). And yet we are so taken with the idea of independence and freedom that we swallow the lie. God calls us into community, and Jesus asks us to love and serve each other. And this doesn’t have to be done out of some pious religiosity. It doesn’t have to be some massive sacrifice where we say, “look at all I did to travel across the world and give my money and luxuries to poor people.” In fact, Jesus condemns that kind of behavior. He tells the religious leaders who make a show of their generous gifts that a widow who gives very little out of her poverty is righteous before God, but they heap judgment upon themselves (Mark 12). Rather, our choice for dependence can be done with a simple recognition of the fact that if we make it a point to be mindful of others and how our actions affect them, life is better for all of us.
In many ways I am poorer now than I was even in those early months on the east coast. I have a family to support and debt to service and I’m unemployed. But I live with a whole bunch of people that love me and my wife and my kids and we try to support each other the best we can. When I consider the others who live outside our home (including my parents) that help support the financial needs of this house, the community grows even bigger. And that’s just when it comes to money. I don’t have the luxury to decide on my own what to do with my money because I depend on others for it right now. I am responsible to them to use their money wisely. Even if I was earning it all myself, I would be responsible to my wife and kids for how we use our money, not to mention the rest of our community. So I say dependence is wealth, even when we have no money. Dependence draws us together and forces us to rely on each other so we can know what our needs are and how we can help each other. Dependence creates community, and independence breeds death because it is a lie. Let us be mindful of our community, both nearby and across the globe. Let us remember we depend on them and they depend on us and live accordingly. Let us remember that the call of God is a call into a community, modeled in the very nature of God himself, a community in which we give of ourselves and receive from others. Let us live in the wealth of dependence.
I am ending this post here. I hope to develop this theme of dependence and community further, exploring some of the practical results and the Biblical impetus for it, but that can’t be done here. This post should serve as an ample introduction to the topic and we’ll soon get into specifics. Besides, this is exceptionally long already. As always, I welcome your comments.
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