Does Pa. need sackcloth and ashes?
WalletHub, a personal finance website, sent a mass email last Monday with this subject line: “2021’s Most Sinful States.”
I’m not sure if it was timed for the next day’s Mardi Gras excesses or for Ash Wednesday’s ritual of repentance.
Probably the latter, since there’s no bigger party-pooper than reminding people planning a wild bash that their revelry might be sin. Ouch.
Sin? Has anyone except pastor or priest used that word unironically since the 1970s?
WalletHub researchers packaged it with plenty of compassion, to be sure. “While many people want to quit their vices, it’s a difficult road even under normal circumstances,” the email said, “so the stresses of the COVID-19 pandemic make abstaining all the harder.”
Did lots of people just nod and say “I’ll drink to that”?
Well, here’s something else to toast. We Pennsylvanians are 19th overall in sinfulness. We’re slightly above average — or below average, actually, since these are vices we’re pretty good at.
The study at hand is more or less organized around the traditional “Seven Deadly Sins” and looks at various statistics relevant to each. Each state’s ranking is an average of these categories.
Pennsylvania ranks 25th or lower in five of the seven categories — Anger & Hatred, Jealousy, Greed, Lust, and Laziness — but our overall ranking is much higher because there are two areas where we excel. Or falter, I guess.
We are 18th in “Excesses & Vices,” a catch-all that includes obesity, smoking, drunken driving, indebtedness, marijuana use and opioid prescriptions.
But here’s where we’re really killing it: Vanity. We are the fifth vainest state in the Union!
This comes as something of a surprise, doesn’t it? I mean, it’s a cliché of modern life that beautiful people from everywhere flock to the coasts, to pursue work in the movie, television and modeling industries.
Then they have to stay beautiful, too, so you’d expect that in the race for most vain, California and New York would be neck and (lifted) neck. New York wins, by the way.
(It’s always reassuring to have a clear measure of other people’s sins, isn’t it?)
Third place goes to Florida, where lots of rich New Yorkers retire. Fourth place is New Jersey, where New Yorkers move to get lawns.
And then … Pennsylvania? Well, our film industry is booming …
The three metrics — only three — for WalletHub’s “Vanity” category are: beauty salons per capita, household expenditures on personal care products, and internet searches on cosmetic surgery.
Here’s my theory: We in the commonwealth spend lots on grooming because we’re cleaner than average, and we have more salons per capita because we really, really like all our cozy neighborhood haunts. These are not vices, these are virtues!
Asfor internet searches on cosmetic procedures, well, a search is not a surgery. Unless this is like lust being the same as adultery? If so, WalletHub has astandard so high, it’s biblical.
I jest, but in fact, it was the courageous vocabulary of this study’s overview that caught my attention. Its second sentence: “Harmful behavior on the individual level can result in staggering economic costs, considering that gambling addiction costs the U.S. $5 billion per year and smoking costs dwarf that with over $300 billion per year.”
And sin has costs that can’t be expressed in mere dollars, as I know from a sad inventory of my own failures.
Although the pandemic’s loneliness and losses have made many of us more self-indulgent in various destructive ways, it has also brought out some of humanity’s very best qualities.
Despite its setbacks, or perhaps because of them, we’re heading in the right direction. Though new to me, this study has been around for a while, and it turns out we’re making moral strides. Pa. was the 13th most sinful state in 2019, the 16th in 2020 and now, 19th. Nothing like a little 50-way competition to spur us on!
So let’s push back the plate, put down the glass and go for a brisk walk. Wear a coat, though — it’s way too cold for sackcloth.