The Sand Bar

I was born pretty much immediately after the collapse of yuppie-dom in a sort of aftermath of the suburbanite cookie-cutter culture of the mid-20th century, so unfortunately I don’t have much to say about that… delicate period in American history. Driven by an obsessive desire for self-improvement spawned from the prosperous comfort of the 50’s and 60’s, the rise of the original yuppies was fueled by the consumption of the baby-boomer generation in an effort to escape the confines of Madison Avenue. But the crash in the late 80’s and the recession in the early 90’s triggered a contingency of doom and gloom for the yuppies of old, and the electing of George H. W. Bush into the White House appeared to be the final blow, landing Old Money as the clear and tested winner.

Well, that was then; this is now. The financial collapses of the late-20th century created a confusion that left the American identity struggling to figure out how to reconcile its modernist life quest with the value system of old, previously consummated by materialism and hedonistic consumerism. But after the dust had settled, a new void had appeared, replacing the old quest for Middle America with a free-floating search for a post-modernist value system.

It was clear that the suburbanite lifestyle once yearned for was not going to carry us into the 21st century, and as a result, a new era of consumerist, capitalist America was born. The internet eruption throughout the 90’s set the stage for a new form of value system set in cyberspace. The migration, or rather infiltration, of businesses into the internet world triggered a massive shift in American consumerist ideology, spawning waves of change in the traditional consumerist lifestyle. This change was what filled the void left by Middle America. The elite urban societies, what once traded comments about Italian suits and Chardonnay became hubs for the latest Blackberry and BMW. Cities transformed seemingly overnight into technological lightning rods. College graduates were not seeking the Plain Jane lifestyles of their parents, but instead were longing for duplexes in San Diego or an apartment in New York City, equipped with steel walls and metal floors and shiny appliances that saved the environment as they cooked and cleaned their organic foods and organic fabrics.

The new decade, though it is still a year and one day away, will bring to light the rebirth of the yuppie. Whether this time, yuppie-dom and its ensuing post-post-modern materialism and consumerism will thrive and survive credit-driving businesses and somehow subvert a financial meltdown, that is hard to say. Despite this uncertainty, it is clear that until the traditional American value system is reconciled with the values of the post-baby-boomer generation, the yuppie will never truly be dead.

It’s always easier to blame another for your own mistakes than it is to blame yourself. The tension between Russia and the United States is a result of this back-and-forth blaming game that needs to end before any sort of diplomacy can take place. Cathy Young attributes the tensions to “anti-american sentiment”, a “perceived threat to Russian security”, and Russia’s “post-cold war humiliation”. Although these are certainly contributions to the tension, I wouldn’t go so far as to say they are the primary cause.

Young seems to imply that if Russians would just one day stop hating America, that the state of our fragile relationship would be fixed. In the short term, this may be true, but after many years, we would find ourselves once again bickering over who’s to blame.

The cause of our tension is more fundamental. The West has never really taken the time to understand Eastern culture, and likewise for the East. I’ve never personally been to Russia, but I have been to China and Ukraine. In both of those countries, life is much different than over here in the States. The consumer mindset of buy, buy, buy does not exist in China and Ukraine to the same extent that it exists in the US. In the Ukrainian households that I stayed at while I visited the country, their clothes, furniture, and overall decor were fascinatingly simple, clean, and gave me a sense of purity. The families all seemed to take so much pride in their belongings, giving me a sense that they were deeply appreciative of everything they had. In America, I feel like that sense of pride and appreciation is somewhat lost. Bombared by television ads and water-cooler chats about the latest gadgets and electronics, we have become an unsatiable monster, constantly desiring the latest and greatest to come out of the factories.

It’s easy to see how Easterners would think of us as greedy. What they fail to understand, though, is that our consumerist mindset is derived from our capitalist economy and democratic government, and is thus interwoven into our American culture. They fail to realize that our economy is built on the masses buying goods and services. Even though we are perhaps the most consumerist society in the world, we are also at the same time the greatest, most powerful driving force of any economy. In what other country does money exchange hands at the magnitude and the rate that it does here in America? Wealth, therefore, is not accumulated in the hands of a few, but is created, and circulated amongst the hands of many. Because of this, we as a country are able to have higher standards of living than many other countries.

Young postulates that the result of the economic downturn in Russia after the cold war resulted in an inferiority complex toward the West. She sites a few poll numbers that paint the picture that Russians collectively desire an American way of life. I disagree. Young didn’t cite the exact poll questions, so they could have been worded in a way to favor an American perspective. I think what the polls really meant were that Russians would prefer a safer, more economically stable Russia, not a Russia-that-pretends-to-be-America. Like I said before, the Ukrainians I met were immensely proud in their belongings. Likewise, they were also immensely proud of their heritage. In the rural sunflower town of Yalta, it was hard to find anybody that wanted to uproot and move to America. Ukraine was their home, and they were proud of it, even if they didn’t have fifty-inch plasma TV’s hanging off their walls.

It’s so easy for Americans to assume that everybody wants to be like us. But instead of pushing our own political agendas on the world, trying to convert every country we encounter into a poorly-emulated version of ourselves (Iraq comes to mind), we should be more understanding of foreign culture and help them help themselves. Like Obama once said during his past campaign, “We should lead by the power of our example, not by the example of our power.”