While writing this, I am sitting at the beautiful desk of someone I don’t know, on the second story of his second (winter) home in a beautiful part of rural New Mexico. The house is far more opulent than most homes I have seen. A friend of ours caretakes the place, which the owner uses for just a couple of months each year. If this guy’s second home is so deluxe, what on earth must his real home be like?
All over this country there are people with two (or more) fancy homes. There are also people sleeping in their cars–having lost their houses to the bank–who have barely enough food to keep them alive.
To get and to have are, within certain limits, quite normal needs, of course. The squirrel stashes nuts for harder times. Your dog may choose to bury his new bone. But normal impulse sometimes runs amok. The impulse to acquire can go wrong. Some people have lots, but it’s never enough. The Keatings, and Milkens, and Madoffs are bottomless pits. Though richer than Croesus they simply can’t stop; fellow humans be damned.
One hears a lot these days about the ever-wider gap between The Haves and The Have-Nots; the so-called “One Percent” and the remaining ninety-nine. Executive salaries are often contrasted to an average worker’s pay. It’s not a pretty picture, Sister Sue. The ratio is roughly 340:1. In 2011, Apple’s C.E.O., Tim Cook, was paid 338 million dollars in cash, stock-options, and bonuses. The salaries of Wall Street parasites are bizarrely high–both before and after the financial meltdown which they, in their self-serving greed, largely caused. Their skewed numbers raise important ethical and political questions.
To my mind, the disproportion between the insiders’ profligate rewards program and the average carpenter’s, school teacher’s, or burgerflipper’s wages is outrageous and obscene. The immense gulf between the income of the privileged and those whose job is painful, dirty, or boring renders meaningless–absurd–any normal notion of how much a dollar—or day’s work—is worth. Those privileged few are skating on thin ice (although that ice may take decades to break.)
This article aims at promoting thought, not armed rebellion. Everyone knows that violence solves nothing. It may effect short-term change but, in the long run, generates pain, hatred, and more violence. A few, today, are willing to be jailed to make a point, but very few, just yet, would opt to die. For now, in the United States, insurrection is not a reasonable option. The military has us way outgunned (unless they, too, someday revolt).
But some day The Haves will look up from their truffles and champagne and see that the neighbors, with pitchforks and torches, have come. The metaphoric chickens will come flapping home to roost.