Economic Relativism

I took my mother on a shopping trip to the Retail Mecca of The Midwest yesterday; Novi, MI. The city's centerpiece, Twelve Oaks Mall, was developed in the early eighties by Taubman and Associates (yes, that Taubman). Over the next twenty years, mini-malls, retails outlets, theatres and department stores have sprawled out to the city limits making Novi one of, if not THE, shopping destinations for the monied uppper crust. Just outside of Novi, in Farmington Hills, MI., luxury car dealerships such as Jaguar, Hummer, BMW and Audi are clustered together within a block, creating a veritable automotive boutique for the wealthy. Within a twenty square-mile radius of the shopping district are countless developments of expensive homes and brownstone condominiums that have overtaken the landscape in the last ten years, seemingly doubling population and traffic.

But within a fifteen minute drive of this capital capitol is my 1994, 16x80, single-wide manufactured home that resides within a park. It's the only place I can afford to live that's near my job and my hometown where my parents still live. They still reside in their post-WWII, GI-loan home that was built during the "white-flight" from Detroit in the early fifties. It's a small, three-bedroom brick home with a basement. It's still a good neighborhood and it was a great place to grow up, surrounded by woods my friends and I were free to roam. The woods are now a suburb of high-priced homes that are well more than ten times my annual pay.

I suppose it's natural that I aspire to have AT LEAST what my parents had, but alas, the expensive real estate that now surrounds their modest home has driven the cost of living in that neighborhood out of my reach. I often complain about my manufactured digs (trailer life) and dream, someday, of having a traditional stick & mortar home on a plot of land I can call my own. My father paid $13,000 for his home in 1952. Today, it's worth around $180,000 - still, it's more than I can currently afford as a working-class man without a degree.

On returning from our shopping trip, we stopped by my trailer to pick up my mother's blood-pressure monitor which I had borrowed. Even though we live withing five miles of eachother, she rarely visits. I showed her some of the improvements I've made to our humble digs, utilizing some of the skills I've acquired since abandoning music for maintenance. She complimented my work and said I seemed to have more room than they have because of the layout and extra large master bathroom with the garden tub (that's now finished with ceramic tile and Pergo floors instead of carpeting). And it was much cheerier than her house, she added.

Then she reminded me that what I have is much more than what many people in the world have. At least it's not a cardboard box, a motel room, or an efficiency apartment in the bowels of the city. At least I don't live in the Middle East, or India or China or Africa - where they'd literally kill to have what I take for granted. And she's right. I want for nothing, really, other than more space and the psychological well-being that comes from proper Feng Sui and organic surroundings. We have five TV's, two DVD players, a washer & dryer, a refrigerator, microwave, computers - most of the trappings of modern life. What we don't have is the high-quality Amerrican life we all imagined for ourselves as teenagers; nice house, nice cars, nice clothing, space for entertaining, private schools, club memberships, nice vacations, college for our children.

There'sis still a price for sucking-up the near-bottom of the socio-economic ladder in susburban America. My family, by living in a manufactured home, is surrounded by construction materials that contain formaldahyde and other nasty chemicals- creating a relatively unhealthy home environment. We're treated with contempt by some in our school district and suffer from political efforts such as creative re-districting and, currently, regressive tax increases that I feel are discriminatory. We've been treated with disdain or dismissal by the local police when we file a complaint because our clustered population causes the perception that trailer folk cause more crime, yet contribute less to the local tax base. My mother-in-law almost NEVER comes to visit my wife, in contrast to the frequent visits she makes to her sister in an upper middle-class neighborhood. All of these things sap our confidence and dampen our aspirations for the future.

The argument that we're still doing better than slave laborers in third-world countries doesn't appease us any more than when our parents told us to eat our brussel sprouts because children were starving in Africa. Back then, we could hardly imagine those dirt-poor peasants on the other side of the world. But today, we have cable television to show us EXACTLY how we're doing relative to those kids. I have to wonder if this is an accident of modern worldwide communication, or a means of social control to appease the insecurity I feel being surrounded by wealth and oppulence.