Addressing Root Causes:

It's Not OK To Be Rich

Someone is sainted for an act of charity? Charity is bandaiding. Charity is mostly to assuage guilt at having too much. Why was there a poor man having to tromp through the snow to find fuel in "good" King Wenceslas' kingdom?

Then the service went on with a sweet story about author Mary Pipher and her young daughter working in a soup kitchen and getting so much more from the poor people than they gave to them, and more such treacly sentiment. I am not blaming the Unitarians. Many sermons and campaigns this time of year focus on giving away a little of our middle class abundance to "the needy," but how do we suppose they survive the rest of the year? And why are they needy?

Ah, the hard question few will ask, or, if they do, they instantly natter on about lack of a work ethic or laziness or general unworthiness, or about all the attendant problems of drug use and emotional problems which are symptoms, not causes, of a grotesquely imbalanced system. I will ask the even harder question—why are THEY rich? The filthy rich million- and billionaires. No one deserves that much. How dare we have a system where it is possible to hoard incredible amounts when others are hungry or cold?

That is the US dream, to strike it rich, as if it just fell from heaven. Getting rich involves having some capital to invest in some scheme, getting your money to work for you, and reinvesting luckily and craftily. But the money doesn't do the actual work, people do; poor people whose labor is undervalued and underpaid so the investor can get rich. How dare anyone not pay a living wage?

I have been criticizing the filthy rich, and most people can sympathize with that, but now I will ask the REALLY hard question, why are WE in the US so rich? Of course not everyone is, thus the efficacy of the heart-wrenching holiday stories to encourage charity. But except for the homeless (and it is unconscionable that there are homeless in this rich nation) even our poor tend to have cars and tv's and other items the poor around the world cannot even dream of having.

This nation has around 5% of the world's population. We use 20, 30, 40, 50% of the world's resources, depending on the commodity in question. We drive obscenely oversized and underefficient vehicles, often alone. We eat strawberries in January and pumpkins in May, chocolate produced by slave children in Africa, and anything we want anytime we want. Almost all of our clothes are sewn half way around the world from us because those people are "willing" to slave for pennies. How can we keep getting away with this? Do we think the world wants to coddle us?

We keep getting away with this because our military and weapons enforce it. South Korea still hosts nearly 40,000 US troops, and many of our consumer goods come from there produced by Korean wage slaves. Iran nationalized its oil and the CIA overthrew the democratically elected leader who did that and installed the brutal Shah. The violence to unseat the Shah has left Iran still marginalized in the world, but that oil still flows.

Nicaragua overthrew its dictator, distributed the land of the wealthy to the poor, taught its people to read and write and know how to be healthy, and US money and weapons flowed in to sponsor a US proxy army to squelch that and get the bananas and coffee cheaply heading north again. Now Nicaragua is the second poorest nation in the hemisphere, after Haiti, poor Haiti, still despised by the masters because of the successful slave revolt nearly two centuries ago.

The buzz was that Sept 11 changed everything, but I've seen very little change. I haven't seen comfortable middle-class people selling their SUV's or their overheated oversized houses. We are told buying is the patriotic thing to do, and statistics from the day after Indigenous Survival Day (thanksgiving for the theft of indigenous land day) showed people are complying with this dictate. Even though the economy is hurting, and many people lost jobs, others seem to be busily maintaining their lifestyles, their way of life.

The symbolism of the targets on September 11th could not be missed: the quintessential military and capitalist icons of the US. Now all of you who are getting hot under the collar and planning to write scathing letters to the editor, just calm down. There is a difference between expressing reasons why people hate us, and justifying the unjustifiable. Violence is always wrong, always, always, always. September 11th was wrong, wrong, wrong.

Enforcing poverty and oppression on others is violence too, and wrong too. There are plenty of people with real grievances against the US government and the US people who benefit from our government's domination of the world. Keeping US troops all over the world is wrong too, and that is what seems to be stuck in Osama bin Laden's craw. He is filthy rich himself, but he resents US troops in Saudi Arabia with obvious intent to control the oil there.

September 11th broke through some invisible barrier against massive horror on US soil, and I very much fear it will happen again. Bombing already starving Afghans who have no responsibility for Osama bin Laden or whoever masterminded those attacks, and no responsibility for their oppressors, the Taliban, cannot help matters. More grievances are being created with every bomb dropped, with every meal missed because the food aid supply lines have been disrupted by the bombing.

Much of the world vehemently resents US prosperity and US arrogance. Bush tells children to send in their dollars to make their parents feel better about the suffering of the Afghans. How arrogant to bomb and pretend to care. The patriots burst into "God Bless America" at the drop of a hat. Well, somebody already overblessed this nation, and one atrocity does not change that, when atrocities happen all the time around the world with US complicity or planning. Perhaps it is time we gave some of our blessings back to the rest of the world. Please, we must change our greedy ways.