In 2009 Tiny aka Lisa Gray-Robles asked me to write about Hoarding/Cluttering. That article went where the Sock Gods take their prey from washers and dryers.
As I was saying, the San Francisco Bay Guardian just published ("Evicting Hoarders", May 4th-10th 2011) a good--though shallow--overview of Hoarding/Cluttering in general and in specific as it relates to the lives of the approximately 25,000 people classified with this particular brand of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) in San Francisco. Being a Hoarder/Clutterer can get you evicted from your apartment and most certainly from your SRO (Single Room Occupancy) hotel--aka Poor People Housing--room.
Is Hoarding a mental illness or the logical result of Capitalism run amuck in peoples' heads? There is a vast economic chasm between the rich and the rest of us in Amerikkka today. The gap between rich and poor wasn't quite so stupendously ridiculous in centuries past, and you could argue things weren't you-know-what as recently as 1980.
Many have become obsessed with being famous, becoming American Idols, sports stars, whatever floats your boat and gets you and your family out of poverty (or, well, obscurity...). If you have little or nothing and everyone around seems to be conspicuously consuming stuff and owning lots of STUFF...well, Capitalism all by its bad little self can be as mind-bending as being a war veteran bit by PTSD, being a survivor of abuse, rape, or any other outrage to the body and soul.
I told Tiny once, when I was getting to know POOR Magazine better in late 2008, that I wished I'd become part of the family when poormag was founded in the late 90's. I was not in a good state of mind. I'd gone from being burned out on Activism 101 in 1989 to trying to figure out how to fit in with "The Real World" (TRW) to feeling like TRW wasn't my friend. But the feeling wasn't strong enough to get me to really think about what was going on.
People getting on MUNI busses were hoarding or jumping their place in line to get on the bus (it's worse now with the evil Clipper Card and people getting on front, center and back doors while you're trying to get off the bus...), the number of people selling stuff on sidewalks seemed to be increasing like bunny rabbits...having too much fun.
Non-profits were working hard to get more corporate in their attitudes to money and the handling thereof. I worked for the Alameda County Red Cross and heard a lecture on the subject at my first all-Bay-Area-staff gathering, and then came Bob Dole's Wife, appointed new national head of the Red Cross, who said the RC couldn't do AIDS awareness training, which generated considerable angst in my and others' workplaces.
There were other reasons why I felt like a refugee in my own country, including being just as good at hoarding as anyone else. Books, magazines, and newspapers float my boat just fine. Not having the room to go all-out simply means occasionally getting rid of stuff and then adding more. I hate getting rid of books, even if I haven't read a bunch I snagged several years after I snagged them!
My tv is dead now, but I've watched a few episodes of Martha Stewart. She is, in my opinion, a PROFESSIONAL hoarder/clutterer. I remember an episode where the camera lovingly moved around a room crammed with iron and stone furniture that looked like it would happily bite chunks out of you re THE AMITYVILLE HORROR movie--and maybe move in and eat the rest of you. How anyone could enjoy a room like that I could not calculate.
What happens to rich people who collect lots of art, cars, motorcycles, whatever? They are (if they haven't gone completely Capitalistically status-mad like the current soon-to-be-ex owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers Major League Baseball team) celebrated on "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" tv shows, written up in other style and architectural magazines--they add a certain toxic pizzazz to The Spectacle of Life in the 20th/21st Centuries and they mess with our minds real bad unless we are strong enough not to buy into their crap.
I was well on my way into The Valley of I-Got-Mines, The Valley of Get A Good Job and Get Some Plastic and Buy! Buy! Buy! at the time POOR Magazine came along, but I never got where I thought I wanted to be. Too much work. Saved by non-enthusiasm for the rat race fast lane?
It is odd that there isn't even a hint of my kind of analysis of Hoarding/Cluttering in the SF Bay Guardian's article. I don't expect them to write like I do, they kick ass often and their ass-kickin' boots go pretty deep into many of their targets. Also, their article stays firmly American.
I've been an Oprah fan too. One of her shows on how people live elsewhere in the world included a tour of an apartment somewhere in the Scandinavian world. A small family with one or two kids. They weren't into materialism. Not a lot of stuff.
Their kitchen looked clean enough to eat off the floor and was so well designed you couldn't tell where to find anything unless you, well, lived there. There were a few toys on the floor of the kidspace, but not as many as you'd expect an American child to have--or what I expect after being a Goodwill donation attendant! Every holiday Goodwill donation attendants expect to get lots of donations because people with real money get rid of their old STUFF to make room for new STUFF.
Serial Hoarding/Cluttering!
I wanted to live in that apartment, but it was so clean and well organized and...not full of stuff I had a hard time believing anyone could actually be happy in it. That's what excessive Capitalism gets you.
I hate to mention Japan. Kick somebody when they're down! But Japan and China can make us look like wimpo-Capitalists. Until recently I had two copies of books about useless Japanese inventions. I actually got rid of them, couldn't read them...the useless stuff was so...useless.
Japan is where the next big techno-thing goes to be born. The movie LOST IN TRANSLATION has a scene where the American female lead watches a young Japanese man brutally (or is it desperately?) kick video game ass in an arcade. The translated-to-English noir novel OUT (I loved it, and if you like murder mysteries and noir, read it...) has one of its doomed female characters long-infected by the buy-on-credit-get-hosed-by-huge-personal-debt bug. In the realm of fictional hoarder/clutterers there is also a minor character in Ursula K. LeGuin's 1974 still-amazing-after-all-these-years utopian/dystopian science fiction novel THE DISPOSSESSED, a member of a semi-utopian anarchist society exiled to the moon of their homeworld, afflicted with hoarder/clutterer compulsion in a society where you wouldn't expect to find it. Some psychic wounds bleed forever.
We ain't the only hoarder/clutterer folks around, but we're told so often we're the greatest country since pre-sliced cheese I think it gets easy to ignore them thar folks who don't live here (unless they cross the border "illegally"). Or the opposite can bite just as hard--them thar folks is just so much more economically and mentally healthier than we is why look outside the borders for other examples and what-not?
Why not? Other people may have other ideas and methods for fighting the problem if all you want to do is cover the scab.
But that's a wound that can't heal unless we do something about how we live and treat each other. If the rich and the super-rich won't stop HOARDING and CLUTTERING wealth and influencing the ever-shrinking size of the crumbs grudgingly given to the poor, the status quo won't ante anywhere but up for them and down for the rest of us.