The tale of my gloves which went missing

I often shy away from postings that simply build on personal experiences. I mean drawing conclusions from personal experiences is exactly the kind of thing we train ourselves as a researcher not to do. So, for example, if I was thinking of writing a paper on whether people are risk averse or not, then I wouldn’t simply sit in my lair and introspect as to whether people were actually risk averse or not. No, no, it wouldn’t quite work that way. I would start off by writing out a theoretical model of why we might believe people to be risk averse (or not) and then go out, get real-life data to see whether the predictions made by my model just built, hold up in the data or not. That is, does the data actually suggest that people behave as if they were risk averse. And therefore, if I was interested in writing a paper on the topic of what values embody the U.S., the topic of my present post, then it wouldn’t suffice if I simply came up with a list of the values that I thought best characterized the U.S. That approach wouldn’t go down so well in academia. However for better or worse, this blog post doesn’t have to obey the same norms and so I will take the liberty of drawing inferences based on a sliver of data points and essentially argue that the two experiences that I had earlier this afternoon were not isolated, random incidents that were peculiar to me or my circumstances. Rather they are reflective of an underlying story of what this country is all about and theose incidents merely serve to illustrate that.

The story starts off innocuously enough: I take the bus for going to school and so it was about three weeks or so ago when I ended up misplacing my pair of gloves on the bus given the many other things on my mind. While the Ann Arbor winter this year has been significantly milder than the previous one, it still hasn’t been quite a walk in the park. And so I was being somewhat inconvenienced by not having a pair of gloves to put on as I walked from my apartment to the nearest bus stop, a walk of about 4 minutes. Given how busy I have been these past few days, I haven’t had the chance to either go to the store to buy a new pair of gloves or inquire with the “Lost & Found” section of the local bus authority. Finally earlier today I had a chance to take my car and drive down to both of these locations, starting off with the office of the local bus authority.

I arrive at the desk and see a middle-aged lady sitting at the reception who on learning about my circumstances which had brought me there, started asking me for a description of the pair that I had lost. As I was thinking of how best I should describe my lost pair of gloves, whether corrugated would be the right adjective to describe its texture, she scrolled down a list on her computer. As it turns out, she was looking at an inventory of all items that had been found in the last few days. When she finally seemed to locate a pair of gloves that approximately matched my description and the date on which it had been lost, she said “Aha! I hope those gloves are yours.” Then she placed a call to one of her colleagues (by then it was almost 5:00 p.m. and yes, the office does close at 5:00) asking him to see if he could locate them. However as it turns out, her colleague tried retrieving the pair from the location where all such items are stored but reported back that the pair had already been donated to goodwill. Well, so much for my trip to 2700 S. Industrial Highway.

Crestfallen I pulled out of the parking lot and headed to Target. (A loyal fan of Wal-Mart for the longest time, I have now switched allegiance, in some ways, to Target.) Not being too familiar with the layout of the store, I again inquired with an associate as to where I might find a pair of men’s gloves. “Alas”, she said, “We just sold off our last pair of gloves on clearance a couple of days back. In fact these days we are stocking swim wear for the spring.” While I entertained myself momentarily by trying to picture some good-looking 20 year old females sporting some of the, Oh-how-should-I-say-it, interesting and chic swim wear that she was stocking, I didn’t find even those images to be too uplifting for my spirits for very long. Thanking the lady helping me for her profound knowledge of how the store operated, I stepped out of Target and into the nearby Meijer looking for, you guessed it, a pair of men’s gloves. But the Greek god of gloves (or Indian, if you so prefer) had decided that He wouldn’t smile on me and hearing the same answer from a helpful associate at Meijer, I headed out of the store yet again. (The story could end here but for me this is where it begins.)

So what does this tell you other than that Sutirtha doesn’t have a pair of gloves right now and would have liked to have one. Nothing, if you prefer not to read into things and think that over thinking is what is responsible for life’s many ills. Well then I have not much to say to you. In fact if you happen to be one of those lefty loonies, you might actually go on to say, that my inability at finding a pair of gloves during the winter just goes on to show that America can’t feed and clothe its people. Maybe you could link all of this up a cruel corporate conspiracy on the part of Target and Meijer to deprive its men customers of the protection that they need to withstand the cold and harsh Ann Arbor winter (of course, global warming notwithstanding). But if you were like me, someone who loves this beautiful land and is ready to think the best of her at the drop of a hat, then maybe you would draw somewhat different conclusions from the isolated incidents of this afternoon. The two which strike me are:

1) The gloves were not taken home by the person who found them on the bus. Nor did the person who was stocking it, decide that selling them on a seconds market was the best thing to do. Instead the gloves had been dutifully kept at the storage facility for two weeks (as the receptionist later told me) and then, on the owner not having shown up to claim the items, they had been donated to goodwill. That, in and of itself, should tell you something about the fundamental decency of the average American and also about the underlying belief of this society in giving.

Let me expand just a bit on the latter (and here I draw on something which I learnt in class as well.) American citizens give more to charity than citizens of any other country. That is a bold claim and one that sadly few people are aware of. As always, let the facts speak for themselves. And the facts are that Americans donated well over 2% of the national Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to charitable causes. For 2007, Americans donated a total of $314.07 billion and for 2008, a year in which the country went through its worst recession in 75 years, the contributions dropped by only 2% to $307.65 billion!1 To put it in perspective, those numbers are larger than the entire GDP of large middle-income nations such as Thailand, South Africa and Malaysia. Expressed differently, the contributions to charity net out to a little over $1,000 per person per year, a number that should make you pause for a second. And yes there will be some of you who will say that much of the above numbers that I have cited result from religious nut cases donating to their churches. While it is not at all clear to me as to why giving to churches who help the poorest of the poor in innumerable ways should be excluded from a working definition of charity, I will leave a more elaborate discussion of the topic for a later date. Or simply point you to the link:

http://www.american.com/archive/2008/march-april-magazine-contents/a-nation-of-givers

2) The second impression which I take away is that as a bunch, Americans are always hopeful; hopeful for a future that is better than today, and a future that is better than the past, no matter what the odds are. For Heaven’s sake, it was 12 degrees below zero (in Celsius) and felt like 19 degrees below zero, but those guys were selling swim wear for the spring! You can only do that, if you really believe (and pardon me as I resort to a cliché), that, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

Tom Friedman, one of my favorite columnists has this nice passage in The World is Flat (among my favorite books, if you didn’t know it already) that speaks to this optimism: “Analysts have always tended to measure a society by classical economic and social statistics: its deficit-to-GDP ratio, or its unemployment rate, or the rate of literacy among its adult women. Such statistics are important and revealing. But there is another statistic, much harder to measure, that I think is even more important and revealing: Does your society have more memories than dreams or more dreams than memories?

By dreams I mean, the positive, life-affirming variety. The business organization consultant Michael Hammer once remarked, ‘One thing that tells me a company is in trouble is when they tell me how good they were in the past. Same with countries. You don’t want to forget your identity. I am glad you were great in the fourteenth century, but that was then and this is now. When memories exceed dreams, the end is near.’ ”

For a society which is selling spring swim wear when it feels like 19 degrees below zero – now, that is my kind of a country. As I stepped out of Meijer and headed back to my car, the cold now suddenly seemed a bit more bearable. It wasn’t so bad after all.

1 http://www.philanthropy.iupui.edu/News/2009/docs/GivingReaches300billion_06102009.pdf