Getting Back to Basics

Getting back to basics in almost any area of life should be a fairly straightforward process. But it usually isn’t. Take something as relatively uncomplicated as switching from pre-cooked foods to homemade foods. Making the change means that you have to know how to cook. But when you have a couple of generations of people who’ve grown up heating food in the microwave, or adding a few ingredients to boxed mixes, cooking skills are in short supply. So cookbooks come into the picture. And food items that you have to learn how to use — spices and herbs, baking powder, oils, etc. Tools to cook with — pots, pans, measuring spoons. Where do you start? What are the basic essentials?

If getting back to something as simple as real cooking is so difficult, how do we retreat from a serious mess like the current wave of mortgage defaults? It’s easy to lay the blame at the feet of lenders, but we need to ask why they managed to get away with the tactics that led people into desperate financial binds. Should we transfer the blame to all those gullible people who believed that the interest on their variable-rate mortgages would either stay level or go down? Who believed that their income would always expand to meet expenses. Who didn’t understand their credit card statements well enough to see the warning signs that said “you’re overextended.”

We need to go much further back if we’re going to lay blame or, preferably, determine the causes for a population which can’t cook and which doesn’t know when they’re being financially bamboozled. We need to go back to the schools, which were charged with educating students for the real world. And then back to the system that educated the teachers.

Blame may make us feel good, but it doesn’t do anything to change the situation. We need to understand how we got where we are. Once we know that, we can start thinking about how to bring about the necessary changes.

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