I am the type of person who has never once in my life expected to grow up to be the kind of person with a whole lot of money. Okay, okay, I’ve fantasized about winning the lottery (although I’ve never bought a lottery ticket in my life). And it’s true that I never wake up in my imaginary grown-up house without looking out onto my imaginary 60,000 acres covered in imaginary trees and gardens and horses – and all those things, unimaginary, cost money, to be sure. But when I boil myself right down to reality, I have always been able to face the fact that my career choices (and yes, I have gone through several hundred) have never inclined even slightly toward the path of making-me-a-lot-of-money. So this is my disclaimer to anyone who will try to overturn my upcoming argument by saying something like, “the only reason you say that is because you have a lot of money/will have a lot of money/come from a lot of money/etc./etc./etc.” Do I know rich people? Yes. I even love a few of them. I also know and love some poor people. What I’m trying to say is that this argument is not a personal one for me. I am not defending “my people” or the “people I want to be.” I am simply trying to draw attention to what I consider a grave flaw in our developing American social mentality.
The other day I was watching some news commentary show and Roseanne Barr was on. (Now, as a side note, I would like to know how it happened that every Tom, Dick, and Harry Hollywood entertainer is suddenly considered to be an authority on politics simply for having an opinion. Just because the world knows your face [okay, the whole world might be a little bit of a stretch for Roseanne Barr, but at least anyone in the country born between 1952 and 1992], doesn’t mean you are magically validated to have a relevant argument. And yes, if you’re wondering, this DOES have to do with my pent-up aggravation over not being able to get paid to rant MY political opinions on national television.) Okay, so I am not going to insult liberals by grouping them all in with Roseanne Barr, because any rational human being of any political persuasion would only need to watch her speak for about two minutes before realizing that, regardless of the righteousness of her opinions, she is, in general, an irrational and inarticulate type of creature. But she did touch on something (over and over and over again) that I think is in keeping with many of the opinions in today’s America. Somehow, “Rich People” have become synonymous with “bad people.”
Now, I don’t know exactly how this came about, but I have some guesses. To begin with, most of the schmucks in Washington and New York and other places who are messing up our government and our lives are rich. And many of these schmucks are also bad people. I think we’re all in general agreement about that. But to group the two characteristics together is fallacious. (To say that somebody = A + B is not the same thing as saying he = B because he = A) Are they scumbags? Yes. But trust me, it wasn’t the money that made them that way. There is a concept we talked about in my domestic violence training class when we were discussing alcohol abuse. The general point was that, although alcohol may incite somebody to be violent toward someone else, it is not the cause of the violence. Id est, if a dude’s the type of person who hits his wife, he’s going to hit her with or without the alcohol. The alcohol just may make him feel more free to do it. I think this is exactly the case with politicians. If you’re a scumbag, you’re going to be one with or without the money; money just may make you more likely to pull a really scumbaggy move. So we can’t blame the corruption in our government and other areas of society on the money itself. Money just makes the corruption easier.
So what else is wrong with richness? Well, it makes poor people feel bad. And let’s face it, human nature being the way it is, even those of us who are not particularly poor always seem to find it extremely easy to list all the people who happen to be richer than we. What I mean is that Americans are privileged. Even people who are in America illegally are privileged. Before everyone gets their panties in a wad, let me explain that by privileged, I don’t mean that they are necessarily treated justly or rightly or that they have everything they want or need. What I mean is that, if you walk up to a person in, for example, the “Democratic Republic of the Congo” (which I put in quotation marks because it is neither democratic nor a republic), any person, – besides maybe some piece-of-crap government official or drug dealer – and give them the opportunity to leave the Congo and instead become an illegal immigrant in America, I bet you at least 9 out of 10 would take the opportunity. Why? Because for all that everybody loves to hate America for all her issues and inconsistencies (which I fully acknowledge she has), this country still has the highest standards for human rights of anywhere else in the world. That, my friend, is privileged.
I concede that you may be able to find some impoverished Americans who are on par with impoverished people in the rest of the world. But I suspect that the number is significantly, significantly lower than anywhere else. America also has an incredibly wide spectrum of incomes. Here you are not necessarily “rich” or “poor.” You can also be “middle class,” as well as “upper middle class,” “lower middle class” and any number of classes in between. And if you ask people what income “class” they are in, they consistently answer lower than the actual numbers imply. Maybe it’s because somewhere along the line, the concept of the American Dream changed to a delusion. Instead of America being the place where everyone has the potential to be wealthy, it became, in the minds of hopeful people, the place where everyone is entitled to be wealthy. So anyone who notices his neighbor has a nicer car (when I think about this, I am always reminded of the commercial where the guy is riding on his lawnmower in this pristine front yard in front of a nice house and he’s wearing this fake smile and he says, “I’m in debt up to my eyeballs...please help me.”) suddenly thinks himself poor and feels crappy about it. It does feel crappy to not be able to buy everything you want (obviously), but more specifically it feels crappy to not be able to buy the things you know would enhance the quality of your life. Here’s what I mean: it stinks to not be able to go to the store and buy the upgraded Apple iphone 4G with an eco-friendly sage green rubber case and $13 plastic screen guard to protect against any and all possible disasters that may occur on land or at sea. Everyone knows that stinks (okay, I’ll admit that I don’t even remotely want the upgraded Apple iphone 4G with or without eco-friendly protection, but you get my drift), but everyone also knows that you can’t always immediately have everything you want exactly when you want it. (Well, not everyone knows this. There was a little boy shopping with his mother at work the other day, carrying around a 40 dollar deluxe Lego set despite the fact that I personally heard his mother tell him eight times that she was not buying it for him. I’m pretty sure he didn’t know this lesson, especially gauging from his shrieks when she finally pulled the inevitable plug and physically pried the box out of shaking fingers. We all have our lessons to learn. Trust me, little kid, it’s still better to be young than to be old.) But most people know this lesson pretty well and they can come to terms with it. C’est la vie. But the line gets foggier.
I think everyone envisions a certain style of living for themselves. I don’t just mean, “oh, yeah, I want a nice car!” I mean, we all picture the ways we want to live our lives. As an example, I’ll paint you something similar to my personal picture: I’m somewhere rural. Somewhere with fields and trees and horses. I have a huge garden and I can things in the summer to eat in the winter. Every now and again I have a glass of wine with dinner. I drive a crappy old car, but it has four wheel drive and can take me wherever I want to go. I just toss my dogs in the back seat and jet. I run and hike a lot. Some weekends, I drive into town in my fancy pants and heels and go dancing. I write. In my grown-up picture, there is also a man (presumably my husband) and several children in my painting. (I’m not there yet, but I still have the picture). That’s it in a nutshell. But only the surface. What do these things really mean to me? They mean that I lead a healthy, active life: good food, good exercise. They mean that I work at a job that I love (writing). They mean that I feel good: physically, mentally, and spiritually. Those are the things I really want: health, happiness, security, peace of mind. My picture is probably vastly different than yours, but I bet a lot of our things mean the same thing to us. Do health, happiness, security, and peace of mind cost money? Not necessarily. But does my picture cost money? Absolutely. Money for land and seeds and wine and gas and dog food and running shoes and hiking boots and fancy pants, and high heels. (Wow, do a remarkable number of my things have do with spending money on shoes? I might have a problem. But that’s another topic.) My point is that it is much harder to accept the fact that we do not have enough money to purchase the things that give us the lifestyle that we desire, because they are so closely linked in our minds with the intangible things that we really yearn for (health, happiness, security, peace of mind). And we deserve these things. And we need these things. Do you see the fuzzy line between “things-we-want” and “things-we-need?” Running shoes are not imperative to my existence, but yet in my mind they are so closely linked with good health that they are practically the same thing. I want running shoes; I need good health. That’s the distinction. But even writing it down makes me feel awkward. Because, somewhere in the back of my mind, I am under the conviction that I need those running shoes as I need good health.
And right now, I am poorer than the guy down the street who can afford new running shoes anytime he wants them. Hell, he could even afford to buy me new running shoes along with his own. And his richness makes me feel bad. Or if not bad, at least frustrated, keenly aware of what I am unable to do. But does that make him bad? Is it his fault that I can’t afford my own running shoes? Is he undeserving of his running shoes simply because I can’t have mine? I would argue that his money situation and mine are mutually exclusive. They have nothing to do with each other and thus my feelings about my own situation cannot be blamed on his situation. Thus, the fact that the existence of rich people makes poor people feel bad also does not seem a valid argument for making “rich” and “bad” one and the same.
So what is so wrong with being rich? Ms. Roseanne Barr is not the only reason that I know we have this mentality against the rich in this country. For one thing, what is the deal with not having a flat tax system? If we are so eager to be “fair” and equal in this country, this seems highly hypocritical. I don’t care what you claim the purpose of having separate tax brackets is, what it ultimately does, besides everything else it may or may not do, is punish people who make a lot of money. Okay, maybe you will say that “punish” is not the right word. But at the very least, it is detrimental, discouraging to those who are “rich,” those who have, quite probably, worked just as hard to earn their money as the poor guy down the street worked to earn his. Take me, slaving away in a big bookstore with crappy pay. Do I work my butt off? Yes! (Did you not hear me tell you about the shrieking Lego kid; my job is exhausting!) But do I need any advanced skills to do my job? Not at all, really. My job could just as well be given to a reliable middle school student. How about Boeing’s IT guy? Could a middle school student do his job? Certainly not. Could I? Heck no! He’s working his butt off, just like I am, probably, but he’s got skills and his skills earn him money. So what? We tax the hell out of him for having skills? We call him bad? We assume he is corrupt and greedy and undeserving simply because he has paved a way for himself that makes him more money than we make?
President Obama thinks that “at a certain point, you’ve made enough money.” And Nancy Pelosi says that not only should we “equalize income,” but we should also, “limit the amount the rich can invest.” Now, I can understand people wanting to assist poor people, but what is this obsession with doing it by bringing down the rich ones? You know what a rich person becomes when you take away all his money? A poor person. If you keep up at that rate, you’re going to have used up all your rich people and then what will your poor people do? (None of which, of course, is even the point.) What I’d like to ask all the people who think that being rich is so terrible is: what characteristics should a person have to be a good member of society? It seems to me that, as a society, we should be targeting the types of people who are not upstanding society members, whether they be rich or poor, instead of targeting people off of the over-generalized assumption that because they have money they must have done something wrong. I challenge anyone to tell me one thing that is innately wrong with being rich. It does not behoove us as a society or as individuals to condemn someone based on jealousy or spite. Is there, then a good reason for condemning our rich, or has wealth merely become a scapegoat?
-R.E.A.
