This time of year always feels hard to me, for a bunch of reasons. But one is that the cold weather is really hard on our unhoused neighbors, people sleeping rough—and it feels so wrong to eat, drink, and be merry when someone nearby is suffering, often terribly suffering.
But do I do much about it?
I felt chastened by the stark moral clarity in the latest essay from Adam Wilson. Wilson runs a farm where he gives everything away. (I found out about him via this beautiful twenty-minute documentary.) His newsletter is like a letter from a saint, or an extreme altruist, or a man from another time. In his latest issue—“The Normalization of Non-Sharing”—he talks about his first visit to a restaurant since the pandemic:
I haven’t been to a restaurant in years. But I decided to push myself this time, given the shortness of the visit and the family’s wishes. I wasn’t going to order food, but at least I could join in the conversation and try not to be too much of a grump for a couple of hours—two aims at which I didn’t succeed. But grumpy isn’t really an accurate word for the sorrow that washes over me when I try to find a comfortable seat at a table founded upon the polite normalization of non-sharing.
In order to build and maintain the specific form of household we call a market economy, all of its residents must internalize the notion that they are only worthy of eating and staying warm if they contribute to the household maintenance in one most fundamental way: making money. Failure to do that is a punishable offense.
Thus, on the cold, damp day that I decided to break my no-restaurant rule, all of the local people without money kindly kept up their end of the bargain and stayed away. Those with money looked at menus, used the toilet, washed their hands, and warmed themselves by the fireplace. In order to continue functioning, the market economy requires everyone to play their parts. A flood of snow-soaked street people would have made quite a stir in the polite atmosphere of the restaurant. Likely, the police would have eventually been called. In this household, overt or stubborn insistence upon neighborly sharing can become a punishable offense.
I appreciate being reminded of the choice we collectively make to keep running things the way we do. As Ursula K. Le Guin said, “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”
