image by David Paul Ohmer

Last Friday, Sarah, Rich, and I went to hear a talk by Kona Goulet, Director of Development for EnlightenNext, entitled “Keeping the Faith: Holding to our highest ideals in challenging times.” The talk was held at the beautiful and noisy Rubin Museum of Art, and Kona started by quoting Gloria Steinem: “We can tell our values by looking at our checkbook stubs.”

She then said that she sees our current economic crisis as primarily a crisis of ethics, and I couldn’t agree more. Many people end up in dire financial straits because they don’t have any choice—American health care system, I’m lookin’ at you!—but this crisis isn’t about them. From the individuals blithely living far beyond their means to the credit-lending agencies that egged them on to the banks that leveraged each dollar far beyond reason, this crisis is all about ethics. Our economic problems are systemic, and they also reflect the morality of all of us who participate in them. How often do we put our money where our mouths are?

Goulet made this sentiment real by pointing out how empty and even corrupt our financial priorities are: Americans spend more on cosmetics than the entire world does on education. More money is spent by Westerners on pet food than is spent globally on basic health care. And, of course, the world’s spending on military and weapons outstrips all the other categories by several orders of magnitude.

Listening to Goulet speak, I began mentally running through my checking account. Based on dollars spent, my highest priority is definitely the apartment in which I live. It is lovely, and I love being there, but it also costs almost half my take-home pay every month. Next is food—produce, beans, and nuts, mostly organic. Supporting organic foods is extremely important to me, and I have to eat, so I’m fine here.

But then that next category is probably something I’d putting under the category of “entertainment,” or, more accurately, “stuff I don’t need.” This includes going to movies, buying yet more shoes, having dinner delivered instead of cooking, adding to my yarn stash, and snapping up the odd pair of useful but not strictly necessary jeans. Gifts to folks who need help are further down the list, somewhere between gym fees and Metrocards. Weak, I thought. Even worse, most everyone else is in the same boat.

Goulet then spoke about the fact that most of us tend to pull back in hard times. Our instinct is to hunker down and protect what we have, risking less and giving less. But, she said, when we decline to act on this instinct, and instead boldly put our resources behind the values we most believe in, a beautiful thing happens—hope, positivity, and new possibilities are created. We saw this in Obama’s campaign where, even in the beginning of this scary crisis, people from all walks of life continued to send donations of five or twenty or a hundred bucks. Each of these people looked past the gloom of today’s market report to the chance of a bright future full of options—a future that works—and donated to that future, thus making it possible. It’s incredible to contemplate how it works.

Uli wrote a few weeks ago about the idea of participating in the economic stimulus by refusing to run and hide from the crisis, but instead engaging with it with the resources available to us. Goulet made the same appeal in her talk. How can we be a part of turning the economy around? A few ideas off the cuff:

• Support non-profits, charities, and micro-lending groups that we believe in, as robustly as we can
• Buy local products from local shops to put money in small business owners’ hands
• Hire people to help you with projects around the house or in your business
• Donate things you don’t need to people who do
• Invest in green start-up companies
• As we do these things, talk about participating in the recovery (as opposed to sitting there and hoping things work out)

This last point seems particularly radical. To be honest, I hadn’t even contemplated it until I received Uli’s piece and heard Ms. Goulet’s talk. Grassroots effort—each of us taking responsibility—can really, honestly change the world. We proved that on November 4th!

Best of all, we don’t need to wait for Congress to do anything. We can look through our checkbooks and our hearts and make different decisions starting today. What are your ideas for participating in creating a new economy?