by Daniel Sisk

Created on: December 20, 2009   Last Updated: December 21, 2009

I realized I’m a socialist. And so are most of us. 

This occurred to me when buying my teenager’s fifth meal of the day at a Northern Idaho Quiznos. We arrived after noon, and the tip jar was stuffed with bills. 

I learned long ago to tip waiters, barbers, and other service workers.  But tip jars on fast food counters have confounded me since they first appeared.  Now, they’re everywhere. 

Like many, I thought these other workers already shared an equitable piece of the corporate pie. Paying anything more seemed anti-capitalistic. Only a matter of time before the hate mail shows up.

Over time, though, these jars started to fill. And with the Internet, a nuance:  electronic tip jars for content, possibly as a way to save newspapers.  Apparently, a little gratitude for a job done well has come easier for us. Or maybe we just appreciate extra attention. But I’m guessing something deeper and darker. Something we’d rather not talk about: the death of the American Way.

The savings and loan crisis a few decades ago shook our faith dramatically.  Real estate values tumbled. Institutions failed. Government scurried to fund bailouts. And the tax payers picked up the tab. Sound familiar? 

Well, we survived and amid the subsequent “irrational exuberance,” we forgot.  Yet, in the back of our heads lingered a tiny seed of doubt.     

But we carried the faith. Mainly because over the last hundred years, America saw capitalism come into its own. Offering the promise and displaying the power of economic freedom, capitalism overshadowed its anemic contemporaries. Its bulldozers rarely ceased building and rebuilding, replacing the old with the new. 

Sure there had been struggles along the way: labor issues, depression, environmental concerns. But when times were good, they could be very good, and many reaped the bounty. When times were bad, we somehow rode it out.  That’s the way life worked. 

We’ve equated capitalism’s pillars of free enterprise and free markets to freedom to progress, freedom to live. It seemed to empower in even small ways, as with the girls down the street from my parents who want to open a drive-through lemonade stand. 

Or the little towhead who came to my door selling cups of “hand-squeezed” apple juice

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