The Have-a-Lots vs. the Havelittles
The Occupy movement signals distress about the richest part of the American electorate consolidating power over the rest of us, voting to de-fund schools, fire and police departments, Medicare and Social Security and countless government-funded programs, even to make student aid a more daunting load for graduates to have to bear. Today’s American conservatives appear as if they all vote to begrudge ordinary and extraordinary people the tried and true public channels for bettering their success in life. Wanting to deprive old people of their independence to keep up a home or sick people to pay for life-supporting care goes further than that, of course; it’s an extreme and thoughtless symptom of greed, blindness to anything but the self and a cynical, self-serving closed circle.
As a person most influenced by the majority to the left, and a person who abhors the prospect presented in the movie ‘Soylant Green’ in which our world has become a scene of vast crowding and squalor, no wild forests or grasslands left except plundered pseudo-versions of what once were, I can’t help but wonder if the consolidation of riches is driven by similar perceptions among rich people. The rich see from their own perspectives naturally, but they seem to have a vision of the public wealth as something they have paid for, more than anybody else, maybe even more than the natural forces that shape wild and beautiful places. Payers in high tax brackets cite nameless hordes of dull-eyed poor who sit forever gorging on fatty food and smoking till they’re dying for government-funded chronic care and won’t save themselves, can’t save themselves for lack of whatever. They’re lazy and unmotivated. Of course it’s a vicious cycle, poor people who breed without discretion, maybe have abortions out of desperation, but keep contributing to the problem of parasites who absorb OUR TAX REVENUES! This enrages the right into an organized clampdown on all who won’t work and yet forever demand that public resources be wasted on them.
The converse is that people in all tax brackets and with all levels of motivation keep proliferating across the landscape. And so our ancient outlook on what it is to be on a level with nature at large, held to a humble dependency on the balanced community of plants and fellow-animals, is hiding under and behind all the streets and buildings. We forget what it always meant to be active for one’s own survival’s sake. Inspiration by the hunter and the sought-for prey or useful plant is harder to come by and more apt to be second-hand, in books or animation, not fresh before our eyes. As funds for self-betterment are withheld from growing numbers of really poor people, these people are subject to stunted development, even, ultimately, to the extent of the people in ‘Soylant Green.’ The scary end of that movie was, if I am not mistaken, cannibalism. But it could, much more likely, be a die-off from combined causes aided by the society’s general helplessness.
Maybe the bulk of people are too willful to let themselves pay attention, but given that there will always be inequality because people each come into the world with differing amounts of drive, vision, stamina and ability to co-operate with each other, quality of life seems to depend on two abilities: our ability to stabilize and not overrun the area that supports us with water, air and soils, and our ability to share resources between the people most and least capable of getting at them. How well off are we going to end up? So unite with your neighbors, speak out for your livelihoods and all those you love with all the energy you have left: see wild flora, birds and landscapes by Tanya Beyer on cards and frameable art at http://www.etsy.com/shop/EpiphaniesAfield.
posted by epiphanies afield @ 7:13 PM
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