Hitting Pay Dirt 8-30-11

Anderson, South Carolina

For several years I took a foreign policy class moderated by Matthew, a fellow once living a spectacularly interesting life. Having served in the CIA, the Foreign Service, and a number of Department of Defense positions, our leader was in a position to bring rather enlightening perspectives to a number of thorny and vexing foreign policy issues. Most of those in class had interesting lives of their own as ex-pat CEOs and intellectual stimulation in these sessions could provide a real rush.

I saw Matthew in the gym recently and asked him what he was doing these days, not having seen him in many months. Looking a bit forlorn he told me he was doing nothing and “just waiting for the big dirt.” Dumbfounded, I asked for clarification. Could this vibrant man with an exemplary career, no money problems, good physical health, and a beautiful wife be waiting to die? I thought only people in bad health, intense pain, lonely, with lots of problems, and confined to institutions would anticipate the day someone shoveled dirt onto their coffins. I wondered why Matthew was even in the gym. A large motivator for my going to the gym is being around people who are excited about life and actively promoting its quality.

Perhaps there are greater existential questions arising from Matthew’s answer. Is there any real purpose or satisfaction in life after we have stopped producing earned income? Are we nothing more than fodder for those still seeking profit at our expense? Do we simply wait for the Grim Reaper to clock us out? In the American culture one certainly does wonder.

A vast highly profitable industry has arisen out of creating increasingly structured environments where people bored to death wait for … well, death. Adults-only living, retirement living, senior living, independent living, assisted living, skilled nursing, and even long-term hospitalization options have sprouted overnight like mushrooms during a damp spring night. These allow one to have a structured expensive wait for the big dirt. Even there the profit potential is large; profit margins in the funeral industry are staggering.

Millions pay vast endowments to buy their way into the safety and predictability of structured institutional environments. After giving up their life estates they pay draconian monthly assessments for little of nothing – a couple of sheetrock rooms and institutional meals in a cafeteria. Institutional care operators don’t give back endowments at death. If any assets remain, these will be sopped up by the undertaker. Is this becoming an end-point of American economy, high performance employees working stressful careers, making too much money, just to ultimately give it all to funeral parlors and their institutional waiting rooms?

At the lower end of the economy tens of millions are trapped in economic quicksand by alcoholism and addictions. Others driven by profit motives have recently found a fountain of profit. Unqualified individuals are buying houses in marginal neighborhoods for back taxes at courthouse auctions, renting rooms by the week and calling their enterprises Recovery Houses. From conversation with individuals in these houses, more resentment than recovery is being generated. Buying a house for $900 in back taxes and then renting it by the room for $100 a week to people who are truly powerless over their lives is nothing short of hitting pay dirt in a big way. Spending $900 one time and gaining cash flow of $2,400 a month from six desperate women in a ghetto dump is certainly not in keeping with the spirit of the recovery message. Imagine owning eight of these houses. Do the math. It’s better than dealing dope, and perfectly legal. One is capitalizing on vast profits to be had from filling up institutional living arrangements with those desperate for predictability and structure, be they opulent church-operated ones with endowments of $500,000 and $6,000 monthly rent or tax-defaulted houses in the ‘hood for $100 a week, per room.

Home for many has become an evanescent, even ephemeral construct of the imagination. Multi-generational extended families living on family farms for a century or more have given way to isolated nuclear families living in suburban houses. As solitary nuclear families prove themselves ever more fragile, more than half of them shatter, leaving millions looking for places to live. Life challenges lead many to use psychotropic drugs, alcohol, and illicit drugs, leading to even more familial failures. The end point is millions of us desperately seeking safe places to lay our heads at night, places to have a sense of belonging and community. Alas, opulent senior care facilities and recovery houses in the ‘hood simply cannot offer the sense of history, place, security, and belonging deriving from multi-generational extended living arrangements in large houses extending across many decades.

While having dinner in a grand dining room near Inverness, I wondered about those dining here prior to my showing up at the table. For eight hundred years one family has been living in this wondrous place in the north of Scotland. The table at which I enjoyed my repast has been in place for five centuries. Portraits of twenty generations hung on walls around me. Regrettably, the present castle owner is the last survivor in her family lineage and this history and sense of place is about to go away, a tragic sign of the times. As families shrink, break up, and disperse, clapboard houses on the farm and castles alike will fall into ruin, taking with them their legacies of history, place, security, and belonging.

Do we really want the social landscape we are creating for ourselves here in the Western World? Perhaps waiting for the big dirt is understandable if there’s little to look forward to other than domiciliary care in some sort of facility, be it an opulent church-operated one with an endowment of $500,000 and $6,000 monthly rent or a tax-defaulted house in the ‘hood for $100 a week.

There’s another choice, one on the other side of the big dirt, one grander than pay dirt in the hood, one giving us reason to move beyond our social malaise and austere institutional models of community. It’s possible to live in the big house with extended family. The choice is ours.

Let not your hearts be troubled; believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many dwelling places; if it were not so, I would have told you; for I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also.