My Word's Worth: an occasional column by Marylaine Block

vol. 5, #47, November 12, 2000

BEAUTY IS A CHOICE WE MAKE*

Every day when I was in Monterey, I walked the length of the path around the bay, stopping along the way to sit on the benches and watch the pelicans and seals, and take in the special scent of Monterey, a blend of salty ocean, fish, seagulls, and flowers. The flowers are everywhere you look in Monterey -- they line the bike path, the streets, each individual business and home.

And I thought about how many of the people who work in Monterey can't afford to live there. The houses are beautiful but, for most of us, completely beyond our reach. That could cause resentment.

But the city fathers (or maybe the state government?) had the wisdom to keep the beauty free, available to all of us. Wealthy people and corporations can buy homes or build restaurants and hotels near the bay, with an unobstructed view, but they can't turn the land directly beside the bay into a private playground reserved solely for the rich.

This choice is a genuine economic sacrifice for government. Not only could the city or state make a lot of money selling that property, but its development would unquestionably create jobs and generate a wealth of tax revenue for government coffers. The tourism value of unspoiled natural beauty may or may not make up the difference.

The real return to government may be in the sense of equality it gives us. Janitors and waitresses and hotel maids are as free to stroll along the bay as stockbrokers, lawyers and convention visitors. Perhaps not all of us can afford dinner at one of the finer restaurants on Fisherman's Wharf, but most of us can afford a bagel or a fish sandwich or frozen yogurt, and who's to know if we're choosing that because it's all we've got the money for. We are unequal, but along the bay, nobody knows that. It's a nearly perfect democracy there.

You see the same kind of perfect democracy in Chicago, in Grant Park, and in the open beaches along the lake -- not everybody can keep a sailboat in the marina by the lake, but everybody is free to climb the rocks and walk along the beach. It's available in New York City, in Central Park, and Bryant Park and all the little pocket parks.

It's available in our national parks and forests, as well, and in our museums and libraries. Maybe we won't ever be able to afford to decorate our home with Meso-American sculptures, or medieval tapestries, or an original Van Gogh, or a Gutenberg Bible, but we can see them whenever we want to. Now, we don't even have to be in the cities whose museums and libraries house these wonders -- we can view them for free on the internet as well.

Al Gore made the best pitch he could for economic democracy. He wants us to be angry that the rich can buy their own laws no matter what ordinary people want. He wanted us to be upset that Dubyah wants to give most of his tax cut to the rich. He so took it for granted that a win for the rich is a loss for the rest of us that he never actually bothered to explain why.

The problem for progressives is that most of us don't hate the rich -- we want to BECOME the rich. When we look at their lavish houses on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, it doesn't make us think about aristocrats and guillotines, it just makes us scale up our own dream house just a bit -- maybe we don't need to have a ballroom or a library or a butler's pantry, but gee, a gazebo would be kind of neat, or a spa.

We COULD hate the rich, though. All it would take is for them to steal these public spaces from us. If states and cities sold the beachfronts and parks and forests to the highest bidder, and if the rich built gated communities and refused to let us in the places we believed were ours by right, THEN we might have ourselves a revolution. If they refused to pay their taxes and left our public schools and libraries and museums and parks to rot, THEN we could hate the rich.

The value of making beauty free for everybody is that it fosters our favorite illusion: that no matter how little we own and how little respect the world gives us, we are nevertheless equal in the sight of God and government.

It's a good lesson for elected officials. So often, when times are tough, and people don't want to pay more taxes, the temptation is to cut down to the bare bones: police, firefighters, emergency rescue. But I would argue that it's every bit as important to community and public order to spend money on flowers and trees and bike paths along the waterways. For everybody.