"In the post-meditative experience become a child of illusion" is a slogan from the Tibetan mind training tradition. We engage the world as we experience it all the while realizing that reality is not as it seems to be.

Friday, November 05, 2010

The headline of the day

Years ago, when I was still teaching at St. Stephen's School in Alexandria, Virginia, I overheard the secretary to the headmaster say, laughingly, to someone in her office, "Oh, now; you're rich enough to vote Republican, aren't you?" (Needless to say, her husband's income was considerably higher than her own secretary's salary.)

This was during the 1980 presidential campaign (Carter vs. Reagan). It chilled me then and the memory of it does to this day.

Here's a paragraph from the article that expresses something I've been concerned about for a very long time now:

Somehow, we have got to convince more of the affluent voters that the ever-widening gap between the rich and poor is not in their interest, no matter how uncertain the future looks. It rips communities apart. It leads to every kind of social ill and unrest, from increased crime to depression to teen pregnancy. It’s ruinous to democracy and it’s even destructive to capitalism. Society will absorb only so much unfairness, only so much disparity between haves and have-nots.

2 comments:

We had a Rector who liked to quote that part of Morning Prayer, Suffrages A, where it says, "V. Let not the needy, O Lord, be forgotten; R. Nor the hope of the poor be taken away." He also liked to point out, that was not exclusively for the benefit of the poor. He said that if the gulf between rich and poor becomes too wide, and the poor feel that their situation is completely hopeless, that would be the very thing that would foment rebellion. People on the bottom rung will put up with only so much and for only so long.

The reason this country has worked for as long as it has is because of a thriving middle class. Lately, however, the upper class keeps voting more and more raises and bonuses for themselves while gutting the middle class' jobs, sending them to third world countries. They vote tax breaks for themselves and gut the social safety net that gives any quality of life whatsoever to those at the very bottom. This creates a two class system, an upper class and an impoverished class with nothing in between. How long will it take for those who were middle class, now forced into poverty to reach critical mass? That is something the prayer invites the "robber barons" to think about and to ignore to their own detriment.