Dear Editor:
In your June 22 editorial, “Austerity comes to Lexington,” you wrote: “Austerity is always sold as disciplining government through the use of good business practice.”
Your comment reminded me that austerity is really a disciplinary practice of the body — not of governments or businesses, abstract entities that know nothing of being “austere” or “spendthrift.” We tend to treat governments and businesses as if they are living and breathing entities, and they’re not. We live and breathe; they do not. The point of this distinction is that governments and businesses do not suffer the pain of economic “austerity measures”— citizens (those breathing things called “humans”) do.
Now, Lexington’s citizens haven’t been uniformly affected by the pains of the recession. Some have felt little effect. Others have had to choose a public school over a private one for their child or been forced to buy a cheaper car. For still others, the recession has come in the form of losing a job or a home. For these people, the pain is partially the pain of change, as they move to a lower-paying job or have to become a renter again. Yes, things are rough for a while, but most of them will survive.
And then there are those who have already been living the austere life: living off beans and cheap bologna, taking only half a dosage to make medication stretch longer, selling more and more belongings at yard sales. All this, even before politicians started trumpeting austerity as “a matter of financial responsibility.”
If you have ever lived this life, you know that it’s not a healthy one: it degrades body and mind.
Austerity doesn’t “right-size” (the business speak that our politicians use) anybody; rather, sustained over time, it pares one down to skin and bones — literally and figuratively. And when you cut too close to the bone, you’re in danger of killing a living creature.
Even a cursory survey of public discussion about austerity measures in various countries, states, and cities shows how abstractly most are treating the anxiety attack that has paralyzed and sometimes choked parts of the U.S. and Europe. The discussion is full of calculations about bailouts, deficits, tax scales.
Now, I’m not about to suggest that, if we concentrate more on individuals’ stories of woe, we’ll solve this financial problem and create a more humane system. I think that type of idea is often a lark. Systems are not humane or inhumane; rather, they are simply systems – sometimes purposely created by people, sometimes just a cluster mash of circumstances born of time and chance.
I will suggest, though, that austerity imposed abstractly from the top by politicians and institutions like national and local governments, the European Union, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), will push into revolt those who already live lean and desperate lives. It happened in Greece; it has threatened to bubble up in Ireland.
Resistance to baliout austerity program in Ireland in January 2011. Photo by Captain Commanokers.
Perhaps in response to Ireland’s austerity program that was created to please foreign creditors, someone very prominently and professionally painted on a bridge near the Port of Dublin: “Greed is the knife & the scars run DEEP.” Sounds like a warning to me.
Lexington isn’t Greece or Ireland, but I think the same warning holds: Don’t fool yourself with righteous rhetoric about “belt-tightening” and “financial responsibility”; think about the effect of austerity on flesh and blood. More than just sad stories about families losing their homes come out of austerity. Anger comes, too.
Mary Grace Barry
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