We Can Dream
We all take way too many things for granted. I don’t like to think of myself as “privileged”, but I am. I was fortunate to be born when I was, part of the post-war Baby Boom and yet not so far after that I’m part of the downward mobility trend that is permeating our children’s lives. I didn’t quite make it into the top half of the Boomers, who are the ones who are supposed to have gotten even more of the goodies provided to my generational cohort, but at least I wasn’t in the lower, “younger brother” half that got half a loaf (I am smack dab in the middle of the cohort). I was also very lucky to be born in the United States and not in war-torn Europe, conflicted Southeast Asia, oppressed Russia or China, pre-emergent Latin America or forever-stricken-by-something Africa. There is no denying that being American, even one initially raised in an emerging market like Venezuela, was a privilege. My biggest privilege was being born to a first generation American spark plug of a mother who self-determined that education was the most important opportunity available in the land of the free. When you spend grade school studying next to your mother, who as a single Mom with three kids is putting herself through graduate school on a meager stipend, you learn all manner of valuable lessons. Some might call that leaning through hardship, but I would call that learning through spunk.
One of my adult life mentors is a guy who knows me, but who’s screen I just barely make it onto. He is Bob Frank, a Cornell Economist who was nice enough to write the forward to my Global Pension Crisis book in 2013. Bob is the wealth editor for both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. He has written about the Darwin Economy, The Winner Take All Economy and the importance of luck in the measure of success. Luck is a very controversial topic with successful people, as I have written about before. Don’t get me into a debate about the importance of luck in becoming successful, or for that matter, the importance of privilege, since I have read most of Bob Frank’s books on the topic and few academics have plumb the depths of these topics better than Bob has.
All of this thinking about luck and privilege causes me to spend a lot of time espousing the importance of counting our blessings and verbalizing our thanks for our good fortune the way a holy roller preacher might. I’m not necessarily about praising the lord, as those folks like to say, but rather just generally praising the universe for letting things go my way once in a while. I find Woody Allen’s mantra that life is separated into the miserable and the horrible and that you should just be glad that your just miserable, to be very funny, but not something I believe to be even remotely true. I know that life is hard for some people, but it really hasn’t been for me and I simply won’t try to wear that hair shirt even if the ball bounces into my face on occasion.
I am at the end of a flight to New York City right now and soon Kim and I will get a cab into midtown for a handful of joyous holiday gatherings in one of the greatest cities in the world. There will be nothing hard about that. In fact, there has been nothing hard about this flight. It is on time, only five hours or so and we are fortunate enough to be able to afford taking what JetBlue calls Mint Class. It is these front-of-the-bus lie-flat seats that are the cause of this story. First Class seats used to look comfortable when you passed them heading back towards your economy class seat, but now, these lie-flat affairs are positively magical to look at. I wish they were as comfortable as they are in appearance, but as the rank and file go past us down the aisle, you can see young children ogling the coolness of it all and occasionally saying something to their parents. It is hard for a child to comprehend why some people get the big cool seats with the big TVs and they don’t. Mom and Dad usually just say, our seats are further back, realizing that most children will forget what they say five seconds ago and get caught up with their own “special” seat, no matter how cramped you and I might find it.
Today a small group of Millennials (perhaps they were even Gen Z) came down the aisle past us and the first young woman in line pretended to go into the single seat directly in front of us. Those single Mint seats are extra special since they have a little half-height door that closes you off from the rest of the world and reeks of privilege. Her friend behind her gently took her by the shoulders and guided her back into the aisle and gave her a gentle push towards their seats in the bask. She said without hesitation, scorn or angst, “We can dream!” The young woman put a resigned face on, nodded and trudged back toward her economy seat. Probably no one but me and this woman heard the comment, but I thought it was very poignant.
All too often, the typical revolutionary reaction to privilege is to shout out the bourgeoise nature of privilege and decry the wasteful and perhaps sinful opulence of it all. That is never pleasant for anyone involved. And rather than make people in the place of privilege feel unworthy, it tends to do just the opposite. People thus offended set their jaw and start spinning all the self-righteous reasons why they have earned or deserve what they have. Even if they acknowledge that they are simply luckier than others, they tend to do that with a sense of at least winner’s entitlement, which never wear particularly well.
I am reminded of when we first took delivery of our new Tesla X almost seven years ago (I will note that our 2016 Tesla X, one of the first ones off the production line…9,500 were delivered in Q4 2016 when we got ours). We took some friends out to dinner and as we parked in the restaurant lot we had to open the famous gull wing back doors. As we did so a family was exiting the restaurant and the kids went crazy over the Back to the Future looking vehicle. As the father walked by us, we heard him mumbling sort of to himself and sort of to the universe, “SO unnecessary…”. It has become a family joke that whenever we open the gull wing doors, we all chime in, “SO, unnecessary…”, which is our nod to the feeling of privilege, entitlement or whatever that got expressed by that family man on that day. After seven years of dealing with the gull wings, which still work and seal quite well (Tesla really did do a good job of getting the fit right on the overall vehicle, in my opinion), I must admit that even though there remains some novelty factor with the doors, they are largely a pain in the butt since your riders usually have to have the driver open and close them for them. That would be my way of saying that Mr. Dad was really quite right and the gull wings are really quite unnecessary and would not be my choice on my next vehicle, as happy overall as I am with the Tesla (which now has a whopping 21,000 miles on the odometer).
I like the sentiment that “we can dream”. Whether it’s about a first class lie-flat seat or a gull wing door, not everything needs to be necessary and mundane in life, even with all the humanistic needs of the world. I find myself feeling no less liberal and no less humanistic because I fly in Mint or have a Tesla X. If I used either to lord it over others who didn’t have what I have, that would be one thing. But I think it’s important that everyone have the ability to dream and imagine and make a magical world for themselves if they can, while keeping an eye on the needs of humanity at the same time.