The catch is collectively and individually we can lose ground over time -- in our lifetimes as well as from generation to generation -- when we have a shifting sense of the baseline for any given service or resource. This is nicely illustrated in a brief article by Paul Kedrosky, the editor of Infectious Greed, with a discussion of the cod fisheries of the Grand Banks. Each new generation of fishermen accepted as "normal" the fish population at the start of their careers. The cod fisheries are now gone - the result of a creeping and diminishing baseline.
We now see dramatically diminished baselines for many aspects of our lives. These losses for working people have increasing speed and repercussions as the result of the last 30 years of concerted political activity by the right wing and the economic crisis of 2008.
Health "care" has given way "access to" healthcare. When I was a child, my parents could readily arrange a house visit by a doctor. Not so for many years, or even by the time my sister was born in 1959, much to my mother's consternation.
Now access to healthcare is primarily considered a privilege. People die while waiting in emergency rooms because they can't get any level of care. In the US there are 50 million people without health insurance, which means they don't have "access." Even people who have healthcare insurance are refused by providers. Then there's the discussion about "quality" of "care" which gets lost in the urgency of trying to establish "access" for those without.
Franklin D. Roosevelt stated that access to healthcare is a human right. My grandparents and parents felt secure that we of my generation would be taken care of, and they reassured me of that. Not so. We lost sight of that baseline and let it go - for both access to healthcare and quality of care.
The same can be said for many other aspects of life - access to education particularly comes to mind. We are fast losing access and quality of education to the wealthy.
The conversation over the past year in the office where I work and around the holidays was revealing around baselines. We all grew up with significant piles of presents at Christmas. The consensus now is that we will never be able to return to that level of spending - with the feeling this is a good change. It's unanimous in my little working group that we don't want to return to that standard.
In my office, we all enjoy furlough days for the improved balance of life and work even while we bemoan the loss of pay. We're a lucky group - we can get by with less income. Is there a shifting baseline for what the work week should be? How much time we devote to work, including commuting? There are definitely questions about what a living wage should be, what we can be asked to do in order to achieve it, and what we can or want to do with the money we earn.
This same group of working people now acknowledges that retirement is pretty much unattainable for those of us who aren't already wealthy. Another baseline has been erased and replaced.
We need to talk more - and loudly - about these things.
It is vital we be aware individually and collectively of the significant baselines of our lives and our world -- what they have been, what they are now, what changes are coming. This is especially important as we face privatization of basic services (water, for instance), a world where corporations are people, and the power of the media is controlled by those in charge. The merger of NBC and Comcast? Yet another direct hit to one of the fundamentals of "democracy."
The new buzzword "sustainability" has application far beyond the ecological. The concept of sustainability gives us a baseline on which to determine other baselines. And then it's up to us to speak up and speak out.
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