"Sojourners in the news" articles are from our archive of news clippings that mention Sojourners in any way - whether favorably or unfavorably. Though we provide the text on our site for your convenience, we do not necessarily endorse the views of these articles or their source publications.

The common good no longer common

Gloomy news up and down the airwaves. Not much sense in picking up the paper if you're not into economics, but we're all into economics now. Whether or not the mortgage meltdown, the banking meltdown or the Wall Street meltdown has affected you, surely gas and food prices have.

We could stay home. Put our heads under the covers and not come out until the day after tomorrow. That'll give us a day without spending money, a day when the only way we'll lose will be from our investments being sucked away and our money market funds drained off from within. At least we won't have to watch, and we won't be adding to the outgoing tide by spending money we're going to need later.

Sure, refusing to spend will add to the nation's economic woes, but we didn't cause the crashes on either Wall Street or Main Street. It's not up to us to fix things. (We'll get to do that quickly enough when the government bails out the banks with our dollars - at last count $10,000 for every American family.)

But if we didn't cause the economic crises, who did? Every banker says, "It wasn't I." Every politician: "Not me, either." But somebody did, and I suspect you and I had more of a hand in the economic mess than we would like to believe.

For the past several years the national mantra has been betting on the come - borrowing with the idea that our houses, our stocks, our Lotto tickets would keep rising in value and allow us to pay off the loans and have money left over. As Jim Wallis, founder of the Christian evangelical ministry Sojourners said on NPR's "Talk of the Nation" on Tuesday: "Borrow money to spend money ... that's what Wall Street did, and that's what we did at the bottom, and that's why we're in trouble."

The call-in program's topic was whether human greed is at the root of the economic crisis in the nation, and moderator Neal Conan asked "the nagging little question: Could they have done it without us? Were we too keen to flip our houses, sign up for more credit, roll over our balances?"

While various guests and callers parsed the difference between greed and self-interest, Wallis made a point that will be important regardless.

That is that we as a nation, and as individuals, have forgotten about "the common good." (I quote him on that because the words "common good" have fallen out of our lexicon in recent years.) The common good is not just part of our religious traditions, Wallis said, but "it's in our American political tradition. And we just forgot ... all of us, not just social regulation but ... self-regulation too. What is best for the common good? We've lost that and now the common good is going to really suffer."

Wallis sees in the current crisis a "good, teachable moment." Without being a Dr. Pangloss - the character in Voltaire's "Candide" whose optimism knew no bounds even in the face of horrific setbacks - I can imagine the American people, angry as we are at the idea of bailing out business when our own economic well-being is imperiled, as nevertheless being willing to look at things from a larger perspective. As Wallis said: "This is a crisis, and we all know the Chinese symbol for crisis is danger and opportunity. Both of those symbols together make crisis. There's terrible danger here, but this is an opportunity to look at ourselves, Wall Street, yes, Washington, yes, but at ourselves, how are we really taking account of each other and the common good?

"There could be some redemption here through all this."

I certainly hope so, and I'll weigh in again on the subject when I take my head out from under the covers.

Spending is not saving

Just as with the green movement, so with the economic downturn: Everyone wants to help you be greener or save money by, what else? Spending money. A few months ago, the marketing messages that came across my desk invariably said that buying a company's product would be a green alternative; this past couple weeks' entreaties are about how to save money by buying yet another company's product.

No one needs me to point out the disconnect here: The first fallacy of spending money in order to save it (you've saved XX dollars by shopping Safeway, says my grocery receipt) is that you can't save money you don't have. We are not saving by spending. We may be buying something more cheaply, but make no mistake: We're still spending money.

Granted, there are things we all need, whether we can afford to buy them or not, but there are also a lot of ways to spend less and maybe actually save money - especially around the house.

In weeks to come, we'll bring you as many as we can drum up that are real savings, and not simply exchanging one expense for another.

Although we've been down this road before in articles on saving energy, some things bear repeating. As we look ahead to the winter heating season, the cost of gas, oil and electricity is up over last year, so with a nod to Ken Ely, home-heating and energy-efficiency expert with Lennox Industries, who sent tips on containing the cost of energy in the home, here are seven things that won't cost a cent and will save money in the long run.

-- Turn down the thermostat on the water heater from the factory setting of 140 degrees to 115 degrees. You won't feel the difference.

-- Turn the thermostat down 2 to 5 degrees and put on a sweater.

-- Shut the curtains at night, reopening them on the sunny sides of the house during the day to let sunlight heat the house naturally.

-- Clean the dryer hose to remove built-up lint and clean the lint trap before each use. This will make the dryer work more efficiently.

-- Turn off the heated dry cycle on the dishwasher.

-- Don't preheat the oven, and use the proper appliance for the task - a toaster rather than the oven for toasting that bagel.

-- Unplug appliances when not in use, including all those cords that charge your cell phone or razor.