Monday, June 3, 2013

Inequality, Toilet Paper and Hungary behind the Iron Curtain

For a long time in our work we've been researching and crafting strategic communication about policies to reduce economic inequality.  It is never easy because most Americans viscerally dislike the idea.

Recently, I was reminded of a run-in I had in the East Bloc nearly 30 years ago.  It was the summer of 1985 and I was bicycling around central Hungary with my friend Melissa.  This was at that time still well behind the Iron Curtain.  For most people outside of Budapest, we were the first Americans they'd ever encountered.  On one hot afternoon we had stopped in a little town upon the central plains to forage for food in a local, poorly-stocked bakery.  I went to use a public restroom nearby.  There was a stocky, gray matron in the dingy foyer who took a few forints from you and gave you four squares of toilet paper.

The few flimsy squares hardly seemed adequate.  Since there wasn't much to buy in rural Hungary, and our Deutschmarks had bought plenty of the local currency, I held out some coins gesturing for more paper.  ( I knew a half dozen words of Hungarian, none of which availed me here.)   Her formerly blank gaze flickered with annoyance and she shook her head.  I held out more coins, and she grew visibly upset, quivering with anger.  She wouldn't have anything more to do with me, so I continued in toward the toilets with my four squares of paper.

It was only much later that I understood this collision of world-views.  Toilet paper, like everything else, was in short supply in mid-eighties Hungary.  According to the socialist ethos, each person deserved an allotment of what did exist.  I had naively walked into that foyer with an attitude that I deserved to have more - triple or quadruple my allotment even - because I had money.  This was as obvious and self-evident to me as it was disgusting anathema to her.  Clearly, in her view I didn't deserve any elevation of privilege just because I had pockets full of Deutschmarks.

Her attitudes toward equality and privilege were fairly common in an older generation who had seen the Communists knock down old structures of class and oppression and bring a kind of rough equality that - however imperfect, hypocritical and self-serving - did actually improve the lives of many Soviet bloc citizens, especially women, workers and rural people.

It was a perspective lost to the younger generations already even thirty years ago, who saw socialist virtues made mockery by the gross corruption of their elites and the conspicuous wealth of the capitalist West. And it is a perspective that simply cannot be part of public communications here in the US.  Nearly all Americans are hostile to ideas of economic equality.  On the contrary, the Economy - like God - is supposed to be one of the great arbiters of merit and success.  The economy "works" when inequality is distributed in just and proper ways - when people get what they deserve.  The lazy poor suffer the edifying lash of deprivation; the hard-workers apply themselves to move on up within the American dream; that genius who builds a better smartphone makes her millions.

The fact that our Economy generally doesn't work that way - the lazy and corrupt prosper, while hard work goes unrewarded - is certainly outrageous to people.  But to the confusion of many advocates for greater equality, the terrible and persistent injustices that are inherent to our system don't mean that people think there should be less inequality - just that inequality should be more appropriately distributed.

I doubt very much that my old washroom attendant ever got on board with that.  I wonder what her grandchildren, if she had any, made of it.