stock exchange.JPG

The frieze atop the New York Stock Exchange building, on Wall Street, in New York City, shows people in all walks of life. One could wonder whether they see themselves as the recipients ("It is what it is") -- not creators -- of the reality in which they live.

(AP file photo/Mark Lennihan)

By Robert Ingoglia

On a recent sultry afternoon, I visited my neighborhood bank to move a small sum of money from my savings account to my checking account. The teller and I unconsciously transformed – as thankfully, people are still wont to do – a routine and mundane task into an opportunity to reassert human contact. Naturally, we chatted about the weather as she efficiently worked on the transaction. After alternately expressing which seasons were our personal favorites, we ended by her graciously smiling and saying, “It is what it is.” I smiled, agreed and left the bank, not happier about the heat and humidity, but confident about my renewed ability to pay bills and thankful that my bank welcomed (maybe even encouraged) “small talk.”

For reasons unknown, I later began to think deeply about the phrase “It is what it is.” I have heard often, and sometimes used, this glib expression, but my academic training as an historian prompted me to think more deeply about the meaning of the phrase.

Context is everything. In my conversation in the bank, the teller was neither conveying a deep truth nor politely terminating the conversation – no one else was in line behind me – but expressing an undeniable reality in verbal shorthand: “This is summer, summers are hot and sticky, should we expect otherwise?” Yet I could imagine a climatologist, waiting in line to make her transaction, aver “It is what it is because we have made it so.”

I am not linking a hot summer’s day with climate change – a connection my academic training has made me eminently unqualified to make. But my imaginary climatologist has brought up an essential question: Does this expression convey more than a recognition of reality?

The historian in me brings up another: If this is so, why now? An affirmative answer to the first question is straightforward and, I think, relatively noncontroversial. In some contexts, our use of the phrase moves beyond recognition of reality to resigned acceptance. This frightens me, especially when thinking about the world of politics. Imagine a (whispered) conversation in 1941 in Mussolini’s Italy — Maria: “Life under Il Duce stinks.” Giovanni: “It is what it is.” Any thinking person would applaud Maria’s astute observation (irrespective of whether she was commenting on the regime’s new-found racial anti-Semitism or her inability to feed her family) and recoil in horror at Giovanni’s apparent acceptance of the world around him.

I am neither a philosopher nor a theologian, so I cannot work out the precise connections in the gray area between a person’s acknowledgement and acceptance of a situation. As a thinking human being, however, I know resignation when I see it and intuit an important linkage between what people accept as reality and the continuance of that reality. In America, for instance, when, through the convictions and actions of black and white Americans, the reality of segregation had to go, it went. To use another, if more distant but equally à propos historical example, consider summer 100 years ago. Although historians still hotly debate what led to the firing of the “Guns of August,” there is consensus that Europeans’ prior acceptance of war as an acceptable way of resolving disputes was a terrible context in which to resolve the issues raised by the assassination at Sarajevo.

An answer to the second question is much more subjective. The historian in me cannot believe that the use of this expression is divorced from the historical context in which it has become so popular. My social milieu is not one populated by hedge fund managers, corporate CEOs, K-Street lobbyists and their friends in Congress. I would tend to suspect, however, that such people rarely approach a situation with the insouciant acceptance of reality. Part of the aura surrounding their power and prestige — a mystique they encourage — is their putative ability to “move and shake” problems until they are resolved.

The people with whom I am most familiar, those on Main (not Wall) Street, see themselves as the recipients — not creators — of the reality in which they live. I also believe that the vast majority of them are — in using that phrase within a political context — acknowledging both reality and their inability to alter it. If I am correct in this belief, the continuance of this perception summarized with the use of that glib phrase is something about which both conservatives and liberals should be deeply concerned.

Robert Ingoglia, Ph.D., is an adjunct professor of history at Caldwell University. He can be reached at ingogliar@optonline.net.

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