No Justice, No Peace
I’m fascinated by the amount of hurt that is directed at the wealthy. In many cases it’s not their fault they’re wealthy. Their wealthy parents were born before them and, in a form of financial gravity, stuff rolls downhill. After the estate is settled, voila, they are now officially wealthy. But wealth does not mean you live without pain.
Take the woman from New Jersey, as reported in the Washington Post. She and her husband, reportedly, belong to an exclusive country club. How do we know it’s exclusive? When I’m told that the initiation fee is $65,000 to join and the annual dues are $19,000, I pretty much conclude that it’s exclusive. At the very least I know it excludes me. Although I’m reminded of Groucho Marx who exclaimed “I won’t belong to any organization that would have me as a member”. So there. Anyway, this apparently wealthy couple went to dinner at the club. Mrs. wealthy person carried a $30,000 Hermès Kelly clutch which she received as a gift from her husband on her 30th birthday. (My wife’s birthday is coming up in May. I hadn't considered a $30,000 purse.) So after a waiter at the posh New Jersey country club spilled some red wine on the luxury handbag, the Wealth family “sued for negligence, demanding that the Alpine Country Club pay her the eye-popping price of her spoiled handbag.” I would recommend she take a different route: Auction or sell the handbag to someone who likes red wine and can afford an Hermès Kelly clutch. Of course it won’t command $30,000 but, hey, take what you can get, donate the cash to charity and write off the difference as a loss on your taxes. Oh, wait. You can’t do that anymore. The 2017 “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” suspended the itemized deduction for personal casualties and theft losses. Bottom line? If you can afford to spend $30,000 on an Hermès Kelly clutch, don’t. Or at least don't whine.
Then there’s poor Betsy DeVos. If the name rings a bell but you can’t quite place it, she’s the current Secretary of Education. And she, too, suffers like many of us. Police in Huron, Ohio, reported that “someone untied a yacht owned by the [DeVos] family, causing the vessel to drift into a dock and incur up to $10,000 in damages.” Maybe this has happened to you. Silly me. DeVos’ yacht is really a YACHT. It’s 163 feet long and its estimated value is $40 million. I can only assume Betsy will sue to recover the $10,000. With any luck that will assuage her grief. Or she can simply dispense with the ‘damaged goods’ and use one of the other 9 yachts her family owns.
We all want the best for our children and I’m no exception. I went to parochial grade school in the 1950s and early ‘60s, and then public high school. When it came to our daughter, we looked at all of the school options in the ‘90s and early-oughts in Connecticut. We ended up considering a Catholic elementary school and a non-denominational private high school. Public elementary and high schools would have been cheaper but a “school as community” was important to us. We applied, were interviewed, and accepted.
George Packer wrote in the Atlantic about his own experience with today's education reality. “Our son underwent his first school interview soon after turning 2. He’d been using words for about a year. An admissions officer at a private school with brand-new, beautifully and sustainably constructed art and dance studios gave him a piece of paper and crayons. While she questioned my wife and me about our work, our son drew a yellow circle over a green squiggle. Rather coolly, the admissions officer asked him what it was. “The moon,” he said. He had picked this moment to render his very first representational drawing, and our hopes rose. But her jaw was locked in an icy and inscrutable smile. . . . When the rejection letter arrived, I took it hard as a comment on our son, until my wife informed me that the woman with the frozen smile had actually been interviewing us. We were the ones who’d been rejected. We consoled ourselves that the school wasn’t right for our family, or we for it. It was a school for amoral finance people.”
I hadn’t thought about our '90s ‘process’ since, that is until last year’s college entrance cheating scandal with celebrity kids getting into USC (and other elite schools) based on the tens of thousands of dollars—and in some cases hundreds of thousands—spent on "gaming the system.” The uber-wealthy are now hiring people to game the system for them. Pity them, it’s not tax-deductible. And, it turns out, it’s illegal. Who knew?
More than thirty years ago we spent three weeks in China. When we arrived in Guangzhou (aka Canton) in 1985, Mao Tse-Tung had been dead for almost a decade. We could actually evaluate his condition for ourselves a couple of weeks later when we spent time in Beijing. Mao was still dead but as we walked through the mausoleum we agreed he looked great. Really. We marched along (with hundreds of very reverent Chinese), viewing his preserved and protected body in its glass case. We toured Tiananmen Square (a few years before the massacre), walked through the Forbidden City, did a little shopping and more. There was a clear and accepted or directed respect for the grounds we walked in Beijing.
The Forbidden City is a palace complex, and it is not forbidden to tourists. It includes the former Chinese imperial palace, serving as the home of emperors and their households for almost 500 years. Foot-traffic is welcomed, reverence is expected—it certainly was in the 1980s—but change is inevitable. According to the New York Times, two women drove their glistening Mercedes-Benz sport utility vehicle onto the grounds of the Forbidden City and one of the women added insult to injury by bragging about “getting exclusive access to the palace, a notoriously congested tourist site, saying she had gone there to ‘run wild’.” And of course she posted her pictures on social media. But in reality isn’t that exactly what the wealthy are supposed to do? Be obnoxious, flaunt conspicuous wealth, take selfies and boast on Instagram?
The Hermès clutch bags, $40 million yachts, bribes for education and Mercedes SUVs in the Forbidden City are symbols. Not of just obnoxious people and obscene wealth but of a world where Greta Thunberg is attacked by an American president, too many people are homeless, many more are stateless, we ignore climate change, and thousands of children are still in cages along the border. We should try and do more to change what we can. In “Mirror, Mirror”, a 1967 episode of the original Star Trek television series, Captain James T. Kirk reminds First Officer Spock that change is possible: Kirk tells Spock that “In every revolution there's one man with a vision”, to which Spock replies, “Captain Kirk, I shall consider it.” Perhaps we can do more than consider it. Let's each, in our own way, find one more ounce (or more) of energy to defend Greta, help the homeless, give thought to the stateless, tackle climate change and get children out of cages.
