A BETTER VIEW

Something amazing is happening: We’re focusing on what’s important

By Chris Benguhe | Aug. 20, 2009 | The Catholic Sun

After one of the worst economic downturns in history, the nation has responded not by crumbling under the strain, but by downsizing, reprioritizing and reassessing its values.

The result: a nation that saves more and spends less on things they don’t need, while remarkably continuing to give billions to charity.

That’s amazing and almost too hard to believe, if it weren’t true. What it says about America is laudable. What it says about human nature is nothing less than extraordinary, and a lesson that can guide us in our future.

Amidst a crisis that saw housing values in many areas drop in half, an unemployment rate that nearly doubled and 54 percent of human services charities reporting a staggering rise in need, people were hurting and governments around the world scrambled to “fix” their economies.

Yet the most recent Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index — a poll that rates how Americans feel about the quality of their lives — actually went up this year; apparently we feel better about the value of our lives now than we did before this whole mess happened.

Another Gallup Poll shows that 71 percent of Americans have not only cut back on their expenses because of these tough times, something that you would obviously expect, but that 78 percent say that they have come to terms with their new budgets in a way that nobody could have predicted; they aren’t that worried anymore. That’s because they have changed their expectations of what they want and what they need, resulting in 78 percent of Americans who now say they have enough money to satisfy their basic needs.

Finally, despite all the hardships that occurred over the last year, the total amount of charitable giving in the United States exceeded $300 billion for the second year in a row in 2008, according to Giving USA 2009. Donations reached an estimated $307.65 billion in 2008.

Now admittedly and significantly that was a 2 percent drop over 2007, but considering the hit the economy took in the second half of the year, that’s an amazingly small decrease. That’s some pretty amazing reorganizing and reprioritizing.

Now let me throw in one more little interesting study for good measure. The latest Gallup Values and Beliefs Poll, conducted each May, found the number of people who say that the moral values of America are getting better has increased — in fact it doubled since the beginning of the year.

Fixing our values

This all inspired a few conclusions. Firstly, that Americans have a pretty amazing ability to adapt, especially when they realize what and who is important in their lives. Secondly, that this crisis has apparently helped us to do that.

St. Paul once said that the love of money was the root of all evil; generally it is believed to mean not that money itself is bad but that the vicious and unrestrained pursuit of money at all costs leads down the primrose path.

So maybe an economy that forces us to slow down in that pursuit and reconsider what we are pursuing and why isn’t such a bad thing. Maybe fixing our economy isn’t as necessary as fixing our values.

After all, if we all can weather this much of an economic hit and still be OK, maybe our perceptions of what we needed weren’t so clear in the first place. But maybe they will be a whole lot clearer because of it. It certainly seems like we are on the right track.

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Chris Benguhe is a columnist for The Catholic Sun. Please send comments to letters@catholicsun.org.