Pre-Internet, I wrote to letters to the Orlando Sentinel a lot. That's "to," not "for"; no money came my way, though I was invited three times to a nice dinner at their Letter Writers' Forum. Got a nice tea mug each time, too. Then I found other outlets for my writing obsession. Specifically, this blog, which is both more "local" in the sense of reaching family and close friends—though they read it from all over the world—and more global, with a potential audience much larger than that of a local paper. My print output plummeted.
But yesterday, on a whim, I decided to write down my mental rebuttal to a recent article and send it in. The process is much faster these days, and my letter appeared in today's paper. The article, which I've linked to on another site since the Sentinel has started charging for online access to much of their content, concerned our increasing propensity for outsourcing our personal lives. I, too, deplore the tendency, but what inspired me to write was a quotation from sociology professor Arlie Russell Hochschild, author of The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times, who appears to blame the situation on the commercialization of life.
These services are only likely to proliferate in a world that undermines community, disparages government, marginalizes nonprofits and believes in the superiority of what's for sale.
To which I replied, "Huh?" before setting down something more articulate. My letter is still (at the moment) available on the Sentinel site (it's the last one), but in case it disappears, I invoke author's privilege and publish it here, as well. (The headline is the Sentinel's, not mine.)
Ultimate trust: Send a child to school
Turning over to professionals more and more of what we used to call "living" is indeed a disturbing sociological trend ("Outsourcing your life," Orlando Sentinel, Aug. 9).
Professor Arlie Russell Hochschild is wise in her recommendation that each of us must make his own, reasoned decisions and choose what is simply too personal and too important to trust to strangers.
But in attributing the outsourcing trend to "a world that ... disparages government" she is forgetting that it is the government, not commercial interests, to which we have long entrusted much that is highly personal and vitally important. Most of us now expect the police, not the rifle hanging over the door, to keep our families safe from marauders.
And every time families send new kindergartners to public school, they are expressing a faith in government unsurpassed by anything religion could hope for.
Nice letter! Hochschild's quote, all on its own, is not a description of the world as I see it, but maybe it's her compressed description that sums up a chapter of exposition, who knows. Reading the article, I marveled at her examples (people really do that?!?) and found myself a little surprised that she proposes piecemeal solutions to an apparently broad, sweeping problem. Wouldn't it make more sense to think about how to reinvigorate community instead of trying to personalize how we outsource our lives?
Then again: isn't a greater reliance on community just a form of free outsourcing?
Interesting point. Neighborliness = free ousourcing. So what makes that positive, and paid outsourcing negative? I'm guessing two main things:
(1) There's a limit to how much most of us are willing to impose on our family, friends, and neighbors, which tends to restrain our impositions to times of true need. But there's a natural tendency to figure that as long as we're paying, we can use the service as much as we want. Organizations, also, know that there is only so much they can ask of volunteers, which is why, sadly, they prefer paid employees, who can be pushed around.
(2) There's a perception, sometimes true and sometimes false, that what is done by a professional is better than what is done by an amateur. This feeds on itself in a negative spiral. I have a friend -- an excellent cook -- whose husband and children preferred to eat at restaurants, because there they each could order what he wanted instead of having to eat the family meal. The more people in a neighborhood who hire professional gardeners, the more pressure is put on those whose loving efforts are not up to professional standards. I'd put our children's homemade (largely by themselves) birthday parties up against the best professionally planned event when it comes to real fun, but when all your children's friends have carnival equipment and clowns for their birthdays, it's hard not to feel the pressure.
