Julia Costle

I often lose touch with the soil I stand on. Thus, I offer an American parable.

It was an American summer day. The fields of corn had emerged from the damp earth and the birds sang through the first rays of morning. Farmer Smith tended to his chickens and watered his pigs. All of a sudden, through the bright sunshine which burst forth from the heavens, the Lord came down to Farmer Smith and smiled.

“Good morning my son,” spoke the Lord, and gazed upon his child.

And Farmer Smith replied, “Get the fuck off my Property! This is America!”

The ensuing scene is not hard to imagine: a rifle brandished in warning, law enforcement called, restraining orders and writs filed, a new barbed wire fence erected. Farmer Smith received a medal for community citizenship and vigilance.

So behaves the upstanding property-owning American of our strange times.

I am left wondering if this is how a good American should behave. It might not matter—the desire to own a home may already be an anachronism.

Property has historically served as the animating personal ideal of American society. As the majority of Americans under 30 will never own land due to systemic inequality, this ideal demands scrutiny if not outright deconstruction.

The property ideal is riddled with contradictions. Popular intellectual vernacular situates us on “stolen land” while increasing social polarization exacerbates the need for a home and emotional hearth of one’s own. Romantic visions of a world absent property point to indigenous epistemological traditions in which land is borrowed from nature as a gift and never owned. This ideal is undoubtedly beautiful but cripplingly blind to the facts of danger and crime that beset our communities and continents. The full deconstruction of property is a mere fantasy amidst today’s hostile political axioms, possibly realizable only centuries hence.

In today’s America, property is the separation between a stable home in which to raise a family and an eviction. It governs autonomy over physical space.

The other day I had a long talk with a stranger. He was a 25-year military veteran who had been stationed all over the world. Finally, after years of waiting on his pension, he had become the owner of his own home. This man had lived a life of movement and uprootedness. Only once he attained property was he afforded stability and place in American society. His story is one of triumph and grit and the American dream. But America reneges her promises everywhere, and the ideals that earned this man his home have died out.

As American families have become increasingly unable to afford their own homes, the property ideal has shifted in concession. There results a brand of commodity fetishization particular to the American psyche.

Symbols like flashy cars and Goyard handbags assume cultural capital as sacred property and stand where the family home was once formerly enshrined. This is the new American property ideal. I like nice things, too, but such objects need not be afforded cultural worship. That said, I have not discarded my many indulgent possessions and am not one of those hippy hooligans advocating for the total buddhistic negation of materiality.

The modern version of the American dream points to the accrual of a new Rolex as a major personal milestone. This is troubling—the objects that are afforded cultural capital are stickered with brands and devoid of personal meaning in all but the most unique circumstances. While the ideal of a family home is something worthy of striving toward given the inescapability of the property construct, the American ideal of the sacred possession has no similarly redemptive aspect.

Let our sacred objects be the ones we have wrought and the ones given to us by our loved ones. Not the objects we have been trained to fetishize. This is the great killer of style and soul.

Let our stewardship of land be an act of giving. With every shared cup of sugar between neighbors and every stranger taken in from the cold night, the property ideal crumbles, ever slightly.

Nate Berg is a member of the Class of 2027.