On the moral side of money

It's interesting that we got all worked up about too big to fail and monitors stepping in, but Haliburton just got pinged for the Gulf oil spill. How is that group still in a position to do so much damage after it has so many times demonstrated its willingness to sacrifice safety and wellbeing?

Oh, right, that's exactly why.

Welcome to capitalism, right?

So why do we get so up in arms when we are forced to see the consequences of the ideologies underpinning our culture? Why is it appropriate to be angry about the spill while filling up at the cheapest gas station in town? To complain about outsourcing while surrounded by the comforts of a Wal-Mart appointed home?

Is it simply too nihilistic to say, "well, it sucks for those people but I still have [whatever cost less, at the expense of their jobs]"? But aren't we doing that anyway as we continue to cut costs and buy the cheapest alternatives?

Alternatively, is the problem the cultural assumption that everyone wants to make as much money as possible? The assumption that Halliburton [or Company X] would offer, that the investors expect a return?

It's been an instructive part of living in the muban here in town.

Imagine going to a mom-n-pop shop in a rural mountain town in California: Ma and Pa live upstairs and have a miraculous bit of everything represented on half a dozen racks and coolers. You want to support them because they represent a romanticized version of our history, but you will be very careful to purchase idiomatic goods unavailable elsewhere because a handbasket of standard groceries would cost as much as a trolley of supermarket goods. But if you're me and there's nothing like a cold Diet Coke, you suck up the $2 or $2.50 and tell yourself it's not much over double what you would pay at a big box store.

Consider the situation here: a Coke Zero at the big box store is 16 B, 17 at 7-11. Downstairs at the little shop, it costs 17 B. And it goes across the board--eggs are cheaper downstairs because the person at the end of the block has an egg distribution business. A cell phone recharge costs 4 B, and Nai negotiates through the SMS channels to magically restore my credit. Anywhere else, I would spend 3 B to get a do-it-yourself charge card, written entirely in Thai. Um....

And every single time I go downstairs, Nai or her husband speak with me to keep up English while teaching me a few phrases of Thai.

It's a true shop house. Downstairs is a shop with shelves that unfold (get drug out) onto the covered breezeway along the front of the building, and they--ma, pa, a gaggle of kids who may or may not be related--live in the upper three floors. Inside, the shop has a double-door reach-in and a Wall's ice cream freezer chest with sliding doors, the shelves with heavier or more expensive items (inside: school products, cleaning products [self and home], eggs, seasonings, all in travel-size tubes; outside: instanoodles, potato chips, shrimp chips, corn chips, fish chips, squid strips, fish biscuits, all in shiny vacu-packs). And a Zenith with rabbit ears on a shelf overlooking a couple of low, teak benches around a low, teak table that is perpetually preparing for or recovering from an elaborate mealtime spread.

For the most part, customers simply say what they want: two cigarettes and an M-150, Mama noodles and a bottle of water, a milk and packet of cookies. I like to kick my shoes into the dogpile of flipflops and step inside so I can try to be less in the way while chatting, listening, and trying to remember which product--lactobacillus milk, soy drink, fruit juice, juice suspension--was at least not unpleasant and which was an acculturated taste more shocking than rotten fish seepage.

And as I walk out with my baggie of water, eggs, milk shooters, vacupacked crunchies and expanded lexicon, I always end up with a couple of mini bananas or leftover fried yams or some other produce that will go bad before tomorrow, along with, "see you tomorrow, no? Happy sleeping!"

Hey, welcome to the friendly neighbor hood store of the pre-technicolor sitcom! Welcome to Thailand!

There are no investors to worry about, no profit margins to consider, and, most significantly, no pressure to move over yonder where the grass is greener. Not that such drives, such pressures, such cultural pockets do not exist or cannot be easily found--the Western world is everywhere, even if its language is not [as I read more and more, I am more and more surprised to see the Thai transcription of a recognizable product--Glade, Colgate, Knorr, Heinz, Windex]. It's easy to find people scrabbling up capitalistic pyramids: they usually move to big cities where they make big city wages they send their folks for raising their kids back home, or they spend their days saying, in English or Thai, "Hey! You! Where you go? Hello? HELLO! WHERE YOU GO?" (Whomever came up with the guidebook description of Thais being averse to yelling and confrontation had the good fortune to miss 98% of the taxi and tuk-tuk touts I've had the displeasure of encountering.)

But such people, such a culture, is not dominant here in the backwaters, where the limelight is a distant glow and instead of the next possible baht, there are the few hundred people living in the neighborhood, the people who pass by every morning and evening, week after week after month after year as the kids grow up and the folks don't, to my western eyes, seem to grow old before reaching positively ancient. Every morning, the same folks set up the same carts to sell the same gloriously fried goodness to the same people making the same commute. Why gouge, when there are the anomalies like me who won't be around long enough to be relied upon, who witness their baht miraculously stretching further as time passes?

I guess what keeps surprising me is my own surprise that you don't shop at a bigger store because you want a better deal--if you're buying any sort of regular, non-imported meat, produce, any clothing, or electronics, you'll be paying considerably more than you would in a shop house or market stall--but if you want cabbage and apples and sausage and crackers and blank CDs and processed cheezy byproducts all in one stop. It's taken me months and months to accept that the local store isn't home to the $3 lemon, the buck-a-can packs of soda, chips for six bucks and milk for eight; the local shop is home to the folks who realized that the neighborhood needed a place to buy toilet paper and cookies, pencil lead and push pops, and instead of setting themselves on the beeline to blow away to easy street, they set themselves to live in accord with neighbors trying to do the same.

Somewhere, I'd like to think a similar message is stewing around in the Gulf spill aftermath: there's no transient biosphere to sack, so maybe it's worth taking care of the one we all share.