Not to be rude but it’s hard to study when you’re hungry . . . The rich people often get to important places first, because they were born there . . . or get there faster than the poor at any rate because the rich ride while the poor walk . . . they also get to important places first because often their parents or grandparents already own that very important place.
It doesn’t pay to inquire how they acquired said property because if you go back far enough in time (and sometimes not even all that far) invariably one finds the same old pattern: exploitation of workers at home and abroad, wars of conquest and subjugation, outright theft by deceit and broken promises: the usual modus operandi.
Did no slave owners get rich from the unpaid labor of their slaves? Did no Americans grow wealthy from their theft of Native American lands? Does no one in the upper class ever benefit from the conquest by-force of other peoples?
Does no great fortune owe its existence at least in part to the production of death-dealing weapons of war? If the rich corrupt foreign despots with bribes, steal that nation’s resources, and grossly underpay their workers, does no one make a profit? You would think–to hear them tell it–the rich are somehow ten times more moral than the rest of us, when in point of fact it’s just the opposite.
Poor people are rightly called “the salt of the earth”. Ordinary working people are far more honest than your average variety of luxury-lapping self-indulgent money-chasing would-be status-seeking aristocrats who put wealth on a pedestal . . . and at its base carefully place pews for their knees to allow them to worship the Great God Dollar Sign.
The crisis is coming because it must come; the rich and powerful can never take the lead in reforming American society in such a way that our country moves dramatically toward greater democratic justice and economic fairness, because they aren’t built that way.
Their whole lives have been devoted to proving their “superiority” through their accumulation of wealth; they are obsessed with the need to protect their fabulous assets by whatever means available; their economic position defines them and controls their limited ability to act outside of the millionaire’s box.
As they will never lead America and the world out of its present mess, the people must. Call it revolution or what you will, the crisis is coming—and no amount of money will determine the throw of the dice on those horizon-broadening days of unstoppable change and rebellion yet to be.
