Conshohocken: Quality and Quantity

Our area has recently been hit with a violent storm with winds that literally seared trees in half. It was an area of complete chaos with no electricity, so we went out to a restaurant for dinner. As Vicki and I talked, I said that it makes us a bit more empathetic to the quality of life of those living in other areas that wake up to no house and everything lost. For that reason, I was focused on lack of quality of life for those victims of nature.

While waiting for our dinner I mentioned to Vicki that I read an article recently that shocked me. My hometown of Conshohocken was ranked as the number one suburb for young professionals in Pennsylvania and the nineth best suburb to live in Pennsylvania. Vicki suggested that I go on Zillow, the real estate site, and see what the home where I grew up is worth now. I couldn’t remember the address which says a lot as I have repressed the memory of everything that occurred regarding the quality of life of our family. Vicki remembered the house number, so I searched on my iPhone and there was a picture of the home in its present state with the value listed.

When I saw the picture of the home my eyes went to a front window under the front porch. Coal! I remembered the coal truck that had a chute to deliver coal into the basement through that window. Coal was the source of heat for our home, and we took turns shoveling it into the furnace for heat and hot water. I was reminded quickly how coal was so much a part of my life as I shoveled it onto belts later in life to go to ovens to make coke for the open hearth in a steel mill. Vicki reminded me of a line David Spence, one of my classmates from first to twelfth grade in public school, wrote on the back of my memoir, The Times of My Life, “Those of a certain age will be reminded, for better or worse, what it was like to grow up in the 50s and 60s in working class America.”

The new Conshohocken covers a multitude of pain for many in my day as the mills closed, workers were left out. Pensions were defaulted. Workers worked in terrible conditions in the factories and for that they got nothing. My father’s stroke forced me to enter factory work for money to go to college which was a challenge. Everyone struggled. Money was always on peoples’ minds as they strove to provide some degree of quality of life for their families. My mother would send me to get my father out of bars so we would have peaceful dinners. He came home one Christmas Eve drunk with the crying jags of “woe is me.” My mother’s intervention always made matters worse. My father and I had a physical confrontation, and I finally tried to physically get him out of the house for he was ruining the quality life of our family. After that night he never drank again.

I know that a driving factor in my life is to get closure on challenges that come my way. That’s true of most men where women respond with conversation to solve a problem.

So, in the fall of my years, I am discovering new parts of what motivated me in life. I literally can’t stand watching people in my biological family or school community have their quality of life reduced and when I lack the ability to be able to “fix it.”

This is a major player in bioethics, quality of life vs. quantity of life. It relates to end-of-life decisions but also to life decisions that are not completely attached to money. Ghandi said, “No one would stand before a starving child except in the form of food.” But it is a paradox regarding money and quality of life.  Jim Carey said: “I wish that everyone could become rich and famous and have everything they could ever want, and they’d see it’s not going to make them happy.”

We talk about quality and quantity of life extensively in ethics class. Most students want quality of life to guide their lives. I remember as though it was yesterday when a student in class volunteered that her father was a successful accountant but hated every minute of the job. He did it so his kids could attend our school. Ethics tells us there is a price to everything. The question is a profound one. Is it giving you and others a quality of life? Our school community which is large has had too many tragedies and deaths of those young and old so as a community we would experience the issue of our mortality during various interludes.  

Quality and quantity of life issues are central to bioethics. Most decisions in that realm focus on that essential issue. Those quality and quantity issues also deal with money and the power it holds.

This is where Conshohocken enters the story and how it went from a place surviving to become a place that is thriving. It was a journey from having little to a high-quality life that I live now. As my regenerative farmer son says, regarding what he does, “If it were easy, everyone would be doing it.” Not everyone can go from surviving to thriving.

In political ethics the difference between Utilitarianism which says the greatest good for my group and a democracy is that in a democracy, the majority must take care of the minority as well. We hear a lot about Trump, Congress, and the Beautiful Bill. There is much said about quantity. How much money and for whom. What if attached to each part of the bill, there had to be a discussion of quality of life driving the decision?

That is what Conshohocken’s message is to people like me. If you don’t have access to enough money for a quality of life, you realize exactly how money can take a community and people go from surviving to thriving. I tell all my ethics students to follow the money if you want to do what is right because an ethical component requires it.

The Gospel of Matthew 6:21 says it best, “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”