All four of my siblings and spouses gathered for the festivities. Below is an image of the 10 of us old fogies in an orchestrated pause during a power brunch at the J Parker cafe atop the Hotel Lincoln, complete with souvenir wedding glasses—in this case, sun—women with white frames; men in black:
Also in attendance were 10 of our collective 12 children, including a generous representation of partners and kids in the next generation down. As I missed a wedding two years ago (because it fell on the same day as FIC's 25th anniversary celebration—the dates for which had been set long before the nuptials) this was the first congregation of the clan (affectionately referred to as the Schaubber Jobbers) in four years for me.
We drove up Wednesday and went straight for an informal dinner/schmooze at Al & Dan's house in La Grange. It was touching to realize that our family has been celebrating get-togethers in that house for long enough (28 years?) that there has been a complete generation change. That is, today's parents of young children used to be the young children, and now my siblings and I are the grandparents. The wheel turns.
While a configuration of family such as this is for the most part socially benign, occasionally you find yourself negotiating conversational curves without guardrails, and you have to hang onto the wheel with both hands to keep it on the road. I encountered one of the those tricky moments somewhere between the shrimp cocktail and the grilled burgers when Guy & Elaine's son-in-law, Matt, spoke glowingly about a Walmart presentation he attended recently where they explained how they were going to take over the organic food market.
Remember Nixon's Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz? He was famous for his one-liner in support of corporate agriculture when admonishing family farmers to "Get big or get out." Matt was reporting something in that vein, and I just couldn't leave it alone.
Taking a deep breath, I countered with the notion that there's increasing resistance to Walmart strong-arm tactics that drive out locally-owned businesses. While acknowledging that many people do indeed make purchasing decisions primarily based on price, I ventured that there's growing consciousness about how Walmart is bad for local economies (wages are minimal; profits are siphoned off to stockholders and not reinvested locally) and that it's powerful to buy locally.
I admitted to Matt that I didn't know if the resistance would be strong enough to turn the tide, but that this phenomenon (of corporate amalgamation) was more than just a question of economics; it involved the viability of neighborhoods and small towns everywhere. I stated that most people perceive Walmart as soulless and are uneasy at the prospect of a future where everyone save rich shareholders are wage slaves. I haven't shopped in a Walmart in 20 years and I told Matt I knew many others like me.
To the credit of all, this conversation could have gotten tense, yet we each managed to say our pieces without it getting acrimonious (whew). But the reason I'm writing about this is not because we managed to stay on the road—or because anyone changed their views—rather, I'm writing to report the comments contributed by the groom, Al & Dan's 26-year-old son, Mark.
Mark happened to be at the table when this conversation started, and after the opening parries between Matt and me, he reported that he also knew a lot of people who purposefully don't shop at Walmart. Hmm. Neither Matt nor I expected that.
While it's not news that liberal progressives would question the societal impact of corporate giants (after all, people living in intentional communities represent only 0.03% of the US population, a segment that Walmart market experts can reasonably dismiss as statistically insignificant), it's a whole other kettle of fish when an upwardly mobile representative of the Millennials is saying that he and his friends are avoiding Walmart, as that's the population that Walmart believes is its strongest base.
Afterwards it occurred to me that Mark was indeed the groom this weekend, yet the groom turned out to not be a Walmart mark.
It made my whole weekend.
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