Stuff.

Last Sunday, the St. Petersburg Times printed one of the saddest stories I’ve ever read. High fives all around to the writer, though, for telling the story so beautifully, even it if made me sob and want to use expletives.

For anybody who’d like to read it, grab the tissues. And for everyone else, it’s about a poor (literally) guy from Pinellas Park, Fla., who, for a variety of reasons, couldn’t work but couldn’t get a lot of financial assistance. His ex-wife paid $78 a month in child support for their two kids, and he could barely afford to give them anything. Long story short, he gave up. He wrote a note (and parts of it are beautifully quoted throughout the article), got drunk, called 911 and told them he had a gun to his head.

He hung up on the dispatcher (I was reading the story aloud [until I started crying] and when I got to the part about the dispatcher, I said, “Ditchbasser.” It was hilarious. You had to be there.). Anyway, he started firing shots out the back of the apartment. When the cops arrived, his kids ran outside. Their father followed and raised two guns. 

Since I think we all know what happens when one refuses to drop weapons in the presence of law enforcement, I probably don’t have to finish the story. But I will tell you why it’s the saddest story I’ve ever read.

The guy’s family won’t pay for a burial or hold a funeral, so for 500-something tax dollars, his body gets cremated and scattered over the Gulf. I don’t know the guy’s family. Maybe they can’t afford it. Or maybe they didn’t like him. But it’s sort of like one last kick in the cahoonies from a world that’s severely screwy. In a consumeristic, captialistic culture, it’s hard to fathom giving away what you’ve earned. It’s especially hard to give your stuff to someone who hasn’t done any work to earn it from you. Here, we’re taught to compete and earn and get and keep until we earn more, which we usually follow up with getting more and keeping more, etc. And what’s left is the “I earned it, you lose” attitude, and the “tough noogies” (only usually it’s more vulgar and laced with elitism) type of ability to move into big boxes of defense and denial (a.k.a.  gated communities) (Relax. I don’t hate rich people. Keep reading.)

But our culture says as long as we’ve earned it, we’re entitled to as much a portion of the earth’s finite pile of stuff as we can get. And the result has been a bunch of people with giant piles of more stuff than they will ever need, and plenty more people whose piles of stuff are hardly survivable. Like the guy from the article.

Even now – after a couple of years of feeling this way and a handful of months learning how to articulate it – I still feel pulled toward the consumerism and the capitalism I can’t stand. It’s natural, since I spent the first 20 years of my life learning to live that way. (I didn’t know any better!) But as a follower of Christ, I’m called to live counter-culturally. I’ve got to live in this world, but by a different Culture. And in that Culture,  it ain’t no thang (yeah I said it) to let your pile of stuff get a little smaller so somebody else’s pile gets a little bigger. Shoot, that’s part of the point.

In a book called Irresistible Revolution, Shane Claiborne (I’m not obsessed.) said God wouldn’t create too many people and not enough stuff. A-freakin’-men, my brotha! Enough for everyone exists. We just need to stop believing we deserve it all.