I originally wrote this in April 2021 but never published it. I'm doing so now because it goes hand in hand with a post I made recently about control in American society. I've left it mostly intact other than editing for clarity, because it still reflects my ideas about the problems with American work culture.
In my first month teaching at Cincinnati Public Schools, one of the students in my Economics class suddenly demanded, "Why's it always feel like we're in a rush in here?!"
The question caught me off guard, and at the time I brushed it off as something that would only come out of the mouth of a naïve teenager. Of course we were rushing; there was always so much to cover, and so little time! I was doing exactly what I had been taught in my teacher education programs: to demand excellence, especially in urban classrooms where kids were so far "behind" their richer and whiter peers.
But I never forgot that moment, and in my now six years teaching at CPS I've come to respect the wisdom from which it came, as well as its implications. What my student was critiquing was not just the factory model of education playing out in my classroom; our entire culture is suffused with this perceived need to be in a rush.
In a couple weeks, I will have about 20 students take an AP exam. If we're lucky--and with this crazy year, we will need some luck--a few will pass, and get college credit for the course. The majority will probably not. But here's the thing: every single one of those students is capable of learning the material, and if we were working on a different time frame, they would be able to pass the exam. They just won't be able to by May 3rd. Or, alternatively, if they were only responsible for knowing 50-80% of the material by that date, many more would pass as well. I'm sure that is true for the majority of students across the nation.
I understand that colleges want to ensure that students learn a certain amount of material before giving college credit for an AP class, but who makes up that amount and the time frame in which they have to learn it? Isn't it kind of arbitrary? Could you picture a world in which the requirements for a college class are such that every student will meet it by the deadline*? Or where the deadline is extended so every student has time to meet it? But I'm afraid our school system is invested more in competition and ranking than ensuring that students learn.
It's not just about school; our entire society is full of people who are perpetually in a rush, because we run on the paradigm of scarcity. It is deeply embedded in the economic system, philosophy, and therefore culture of this country. Maybe it's fitting that it was in an Economics class that I was asked the question above. When I first studied economics, I remember taking issue with the very first assumption in the textbook, namely that there is only a scarce amount of resources in the world, and not enough to meet everyone's needs and wants. Hmm, says who? And whose wants? This paradigm is not a universal truth, but only exists in a culture where too much is never enough, which is unfortunately how we've been trained to view the world. But all across the globe there are cultures that don't view things that way, but see the world as providing for our needs in abundance. Examples of peoples with such cultures abounded on this very land before being pushed out, "reeducated," and/or decimated by Europeans.
Scarcity culture is rooted in our capitalist economic system, which can only survive if businesses and therefore people are endlessly increasing productivity, and at all costs. Think about how much our productive capabilities have increased over the past couple centuries. The fact that I can spend 2 minutes sending a message across the country that would have taken two weeks or two months some time ago; that I can send money to a person or business with the click of a button; that I can make my own elaborate slideshows with pictures and videos and surveys and what have you instead of relying on a textbook in class; these are just tiny examples of how much more we can get done in our days than in the past.
But has that made our lives easier? No, because the whole system is structured on competition, meaning a company can never just chill, but always has to "improve" in order to keep up with others. The demand for increased productivity gets passed down to us, the workers, endlessly, even though the profits don't. Think about this: workers fought a long, hard battle for a 40-hour work week OVER ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO. And yet here we are in 2021, despite the immense advancements in technology that have exponentially increased our productivity over that time span, operating off the assumption that a 40-hour week is normal. In fact, many of us work much more than that, and many don't even make a living salary off of it. All because of the scarcity myth embedded in our economic system.
But why did capitalism take hold here of all places? Why were we so susceptible to it? I think part of it has to do with the trauma of those of us with ancestry in Europe. Europe is not a very hospitable place to live compared with more tropical places. Long, cold winters and the possibility of a bad harvest, mixed with feudal structures that allowed for hoarding that led to famines among the poor. Public executions, torture, witch trials, and deadly wars were all commonplace. All that instilled into many Europeans a sense of impending doom. Fleeing famine, war, and persecution, white folks' ancestors came to the U.S. to escape, but didn't necessarily heal the trauma from their homeland, and we still suffer from some of those traumatic retentions today. (Resmaa Menakem outlines this so well in his book My Grandmother's Hands; I highly recommend checking it out.)
Do you ever have that nagging feeling that something is wrong? That you have to DO something, and act fast, or else everything's going to fall apart? It's hard to say, but at least some of that is passed down generationally, and has its roots in the living situations of our ancestors. Of course, white people are not the only ones to suffer from this, partly because, as Menakem and others have pointed out, white people arriving in North America proceeded to blow their unhealed trauma onto other bodies, primarily of color, especially Black and indigenous people.
I also believe that the mainstream Christianity we are accustomed to in the U.S., which has been disastrously distorted over the past 2000 years, contributes to this scarcity culture. Too often the capitalist-tinged Christianity of today teaches a dualistic, black-and-white version of good vs. evil. This contributes to our sense of perpetual fear about whether or not we're doing what's "right," because a wrong choice could lead us to poverty and social disgrace. I guess we Christians have forgotten that the poor and socially outcast were the folks with whom Jesus chose to live in solidarity, and that he consistently preached a gospel of abundance and not worrying about material possessions.
All this adds up to decisions being made that encourage us to always be "improving" and "increasing" something. So when it comes time to decide how much material to put in a college course, instead of doing an amount that everyone could do comfortably, they do the opposite: make it so challenging that only a very few can master the material with an A. Of course this creates nice little rankings that fit perfectly with the hierarchical system necessitated by capitalism.
If you start paying attention, maybe you'll find you're like me: constantly rushing, even if there's no real need to. It was only last year that I noticed that I'm consistently at a near-sprint walking down the hallways at my school. When I'm washing dishes, my shoulders are constricted and I'm trying to do it as quickly as possible. On the road, if another driver causes me a two second delay (literally), they get a verbal berating (even though they may never hear it). And why? No other real reason than a false sense that there's not enough time. I wonder if this translates to our views on aging as a negative and our perverse fear of death, again something foreign to most other cultures throughout human history.
So we're always in a rush, always feeling like we don't have enough time, and we see it as completely normal. But it doesn't have to be this way. Imagine just going through life content with whatever we accomplish that day? This takes more than just a shift in personal attitudes; as mentioned, our capitalist system fuels scarcity thinking and our need to rush. We need a collective shift in systems and culture; and the last thing I'm trying to do is make people feel guilty for something that all of us fall victim to at least to some degree. But if we acknowledge that things could be different, and that there's no need for us to rush so much in the 21st century, that there's enough to go around for everyone, then maybe we'll start embodying and making moves towards a world that is more relaxed, and therefore more equitable.
Here's another post about my experience with a similar concept in Guatemala.
*Just an aside, what the hell kind of a word is "deadline," anyway, and what does it imply? I just looked it up; apparently it's a civil war term used to describe a line that prisoners of war were not to cross or else be shot by guards. Hmm, talk about urgency; what an interesting word to choose for the concept of a due date.)
**I can't claim to have come up with any of my ideas purely on my own. They are always a big synthesis of my life experiences and things I've read. Here's some, though surely not all, of the people/writings that probably influenced a lot of this: Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass, Resmaa Menakem's My Grandmother's Hands, Adrienne Marie Brown's Emergent Strategy and other writings, conversations and classes with Kelly Germaine, Angel Kyodo Williams' Radical Dharma.
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