Barely Managing ... Without the Yacht

A woman I know is going through her 13th mid-life crisis. “I’m sick of riding on other people’s yachts,” she told me. “I want one of my own.”

This, of course, is one of the tragic passage points in adult life. Realizing that you’ll never be quite as filthy rich as you would like. So, my friend is making do with the Cadillac and the Acapulco cruise.

Golda (let’s call her) is one of those people who has lost perspective. It’s easy to do at a time when every citizen seems to feel that the Constitution guarantees us the inalienable right to life, liberty and More Stuff Than We Know What to Do With.

While a lot of attention has been focused on homelessness and poverty in America, I have been stunned by the flip side of the coin. How did so many people come to live like lords and ladies?

You can walk around dozens of neighborhoods (if the cops don’t stop you and ask why you’re on foot) and see house after stately house with two gleaming cars in the driveway. Even if you don’t own a house, you probably have at least one gleaming car. Even if you don’t have one gleaming car, you probably have at least one amazing machine--a computer or a VCR or a compact disc player or a phone-answering machine. Many of my friends have all of the above. They’re just keeping up with the norm.

I can easily recall when any one of these gizmos would have qualified you as a rich person. But rather than making us feel like rich people, our things seem to remind us only of the other things we don’t have. We brood about not being King of the Hill like a nation of spoiled brats (“Boo hoo, I’m just the Duke of Earl”).

You’d think we’d wake up from our misery and say, “Ya know, the materialism thing just isn’t working.” Instead we wake up and say, “I need cable.”

Oh. Me too. As soon as I got a new lamp for the solarium (get that--the solarium!) I realized I needed new furniture to go with it. Otherwise, the new lamp stood out among all the old ugly stuff.

A big problem with all these strange feelings of deprivation is the lack of sympathy from any but richer friends. That’s why God invented therapists.

When my poor yachtless friend told me she was seeing a therapist, I reminded her of some of her qualities. “You’re a good parent,” I told her, and in all honesty it’s what I admire most about this person. “You were able to be one despite the fact that your own parents weren’t the greatest role models.”

“They were the worst,” she said.

“Now wait a minute,” I reminded her. “Think of parents on a continuum, with ‘Father Knows Best’ at one end and keeping the kid locked in a cage on the other. You were somewhere in the middle.”

Then she said, “I was an abused child.”

We talked about this at length. My friend was never hit or physically molested in any way. She was never neglected. Her parents loved her and hugged her a lot. They weren’t the brightest, most sophisticated people, and they didn’t give her everything she wanted.

We’re abusing the concept of abuse. It’s part of the lost sense of proportion in the goofy world of haves and have-mores.

I’m thinking of organizing walking tours on the poor side of town. (The cops won’t stop us there.) Maybe we need to become poverty voyeurs to see through the warped norm.