Camels Through Needles

Help me figure out the 1%. I have a few million or billion dollars, which gives me power to do immeasurable good in the world. Not only do I squander it by buying bigger yachts than my fellow 1%’er and a house bigger and emptier than I’ll ever need, but I have such disdain for poor people who are—well, poor— that I actively work to make sure that they have to struggle like hell to stay in their modest home or I repossess it. I insist they pay exorbitant fees for health care when they get sick just because—hmm.Why? I make sure their schools are crap, I try to shut down Planned Parenthood so that their’s is unplanned and they have to struggle yet more with unwanted children. I break every law I can when it comes to paying taxes or take more money illegally from the people who have given the bank I run money and then get away with it all even when I’m caught. And then cry for Law and Order when a desperate poor person robs a 7-11. I go after the undocumented immigrant who has cleaned my house or picked food that goes on my table and tear him away from his children just to show who’s in charge here.

What kind of person is that? Who has taken, either by luck, inheritance or mean-spirited greedy grabbing far more than their share of the earth’s resources than any one human being should ever have and feels the need to keep taking more and yet more (Rockefeller’s quote: “How much is enough?” “Just a little bit more.”) and then sets about to organize the government and legal system in such a way as to make sure that others get less and less. Help me understand what goes on in their brain. Help me comprehend how their heart works.

I think we need to understand because these crazed psychopaths are taking over the world—in the U.S., in Brazil, in Turkey, in Austria and France and maybe soon the Netherlands—and they’re hell-bent on taking the rest of us down. Again. What did we do to them to make them so angry and heartless? We probably bought their products, looked the other way during their banking scandals, admired them because we’ve been trained to value wealth and still they don’t want to at least leave us alone, never mind thank us? If it’s not the money, it’s the power (though the two are often one and the same) and they want to make sure that it’s always their way or the highway— and then they won't repair the highway roads with taxes except on the roads they drive on. Who is so afraid of life and love that they need to beat others down and hold us hostage in their dirty game?

Some of us may feel some small consolation that unless someone has figured out how to thread camels through needles, we won’t have to rub shoulders with them in heaven. Perhaps we'll watch them on wide-screen TV’s burning and shrieking in eternal hellfire while we rest on rent-free puffy clouds. But if, like me, you’d rather feel the heaven available here on earth, first in the human soul and heart, and then in a society organized to create loving communities helping each other and celebrating life together lived in harmonious balance with all living forms, well, then we have to deal with these creeps. The Occupy Movement called attention to them and now they are wreaking revenge. And it ain’t pretty.

Come on, 99%. Let’s figure out how to stop them and then show them that life lived in simple kindness and generosity is far, far better than the choices they’ve made. Any ideas out there as to how?