Being a rare liberal in a Republican family in a red state is sometimes discouraging. My conservative friends and family see me as a challenge, a problem, a project they need to work on. So they send me e-mails like the one I received last night:

“An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before, but had once failed an entire class.

That class had insisted that Obama’s socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer. The professor then said, “OK, we will have an experiment in this class on Obama’s plan.” All grades would be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so no one would fail and no one would receive an A.

After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy. As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little.

The second test average was a D! No one was happy.

When the 3rd test rolled around, the average was an F.

The scores never increased as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else. All failed, to their great surprise, and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed.

Could not be any simpler than that.”

No, it could not be any simpler, but it could be MUCH more complicated. And unfortunately, economics is complicated.
After reading this, I felt some things were just “off.” First, as a college instructor myself, I could not imagine an entire class of college students agreeing that “Obama’s socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer,” much less all of them agreeing to the professor’s proposition. I can’t even get my 24-member classes to agree on a simple due date. Second, this e-mail assumes a level of naïve idealism that I found offensive. My students have a perfectly reasonable view of reality; none of them would be so silly as to believe ANY system could assure that kind of utopia.

Then there was the issue of chronology. “An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before, but had once failed an entire class. That class had insisted that Obama’s socialism worked…” This is all in past tense. If the professor “had once failed an entire class,” it would have to have been in May of this year since that is the only semester completed since Obama was elected. And this discussion ending with the idea that “Obama’s socialism worked” would have to taken place very early in the semester since it occurred before the first test. Since Obama was inaugurated weeks after the spring semester started, something was amiss. So I checked out one of my favorite websites: www.snopes.com.  Sure enough, this is a legend, dating back about 15 years: http://www.snopes.com/college/exam/socialism.asp

It is an interesting illustration, but it contradicts the experience I have had with the over 100 teams I’ve mentored in my professional writing classes. Half of the students’ grades in the course is based on an applied research project that they do in teams. The average grade on those 100 projects is a B. And I have always seen that the stronger students bring up the weaker ones, but not the other way around. My fellow instructors and I actually had a discussion last spring about the fact that the deans keep asking why our grades are so high. Our consensus was that the collaborative group projects bring up the average.

All that said, I am not a socialist, nor do I believe President Obama is or I would not have voted for him. Unregulated capitalism is, however, a nightmare. I think that is one of the points of “A Christmas Carol,” one of my favorite novels and especially appropriate this time of year. There will always be those Scrooges, Mr. Potters (the miser from “It’s a Wonderful Life”), Bernie Madoffs, and Kenneth Lays who will take, take, take if no one stops them. And since most of the rest of us cannot afford to take them on, the government’s pretty much our last line of defense. Somewhere between communism and capitalism is a system that works.

Even Ayn Rand acolyte Alan Greenspan realized in the end that we cannot trust financial companies and businesses to act responsibly. What’s more, this brilliant man recognized that economics is not simple: “…we’re not smart enough as people” (“Greenspan Admits ‘Flaw’ to Congress, Predicts More Economic Problems,” http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/july-dec08/crisishearing_10-23.html).

So to come back to the last line of the e-mail, no, it is not simple. It’s complicated. And we just have to keep tweaking until we get it right.

It seems like we all spend a lot of time and energy complaining about our nation, our government, our economy, our countrymen. So I was pleasantly surprised when I suddenly realized today that I had something really positive to say. I discovered something that we are doing well, even beautifully.

Before I explain my epiphany, there are three things you should know about me. First, I’m an efficiency freak. I am always looking for ways to do things faster and easier, or better yet, ways to do multiple things at once. It comes from years of overscheduling myself so badly that I had no choice but to find clever ways of multitasking to get myself out of the mess I’d made. The best example of my efficiency obsession (and the most embarrassing) is my grocery shopping behavior. Not only do I have a thorough shopping list, it is in order according to the setup of the store where I buy my groceries. And heaven forbid I should miss something and have to backtrack! I mutter furiously under my breath any time I have to go back to an aisle I already visited. And when my grocery remodeled and re-ordered their aisles, I actually took pictures of the signs so I could re-organize my list.

The second thing is related to my love of efficiency; I hate waste. Wasted time, wasted energy, wasted food, wasted paper. Anything I can recycle gets sent to Goodwill or friends or the recycling plant.  My refrigerator’s produce bins are checked regularly; anything that is starting to go bad must either be frozen or used somehow.

The final thing you should know is that I am crazy about charities, especially those involving the environment, education or small creatures (children or animals). Yesterday alone, I donated to five separate philanthropy projects. I’m not bragging; I simply cannot say no.

Okay, so given those three things about my personality, you can understand how excited I was yesterday when I realized that I was incidentally involved in an activity that combined all those things. Not only did it satisfy me personally, it also proved to me that Americans are still pretty darned resourceful despite the entitlement and laziness that has crept into our society in the last few decades.

Here’s what happened: I bought a diet Coke.

Yep. Not just any diet Coke – a 50-cent can of diet Coke. But wait, my story gets better! I bought this particular diet Coke from our university’s Anthropology Club. They sell cans of soda for 50 cents as a club fundraiser. Now, I like buying soda from them for two reasons. One, they’re right next door to our Writing Center, and two, they only charge 50 cents, which is 75 cents less than the bottled Cokes in the vending machines down in the basement.

Okay, so follow this. The professor who sponsors the Anthropology Club buys the Cokes in bulk from Costco.  The club sells them and keeps the profits for the club funds. I buy the soda. Then I take the empty can home and put it in a bin in my garage. When the bin is full, I take it to my son’s elementary school. His school has recycle bins for aluminum cans; they use proceeds from the recycling as a fundraiser. Oh my.

It’s just the kind of thing I love: efficient recycling for philanthropy. Coca-Cola gets a profit; Costco gets a profit;  the Anthropology Club makes money for its fundraiser; I save money on my soda; my son’s school makes money for their fundraiser; the recycling company gets raw materials to sell back to Coca-Cola to start the whole process over again.

I know it’s uber-geeky to get this excited over a little process like this, but I have been buying soda from Anthropology for years without thinking twice about any of it. For some reason, it hit me today as I was taking the cans to my son’s school. This is something America is doing well. We are using our ultra-materialistic, capitalist system to do some good things.  We’re supporting education, supporting kids, maintaining the economy and recycling.  It made me proud.