The rat in the rat race March 18, 1985
It’s easy to hate banks and government institutions that constantly
belittle little people.
Bankers, with their chests puffed out like pompous self-satisfied
rooster, pursue cash with all the greedy integrity of a snide fox, and getting
it back from them is about as pointless as chasing a greased pig.
You can’t blame bankers or politicians since we as a society
have given them license to steal, if through high interest rates or worse, high
taxes.
I used to hear a lot from professors at college about the
idea of property, how the founding fathers ripped off Indians, setting up rules
– through the concept of Freeholders – that held back those who did not own land,
in particular black people.
A more than dishonest argument – in particular when it came
to the reforms of the 1840s – when for the first-time non-property owners got
the right to vote.
Radicals claim this was an effort to disenfranchise black
people, when in fact, it was the first bold step towards giving rights to
people who otherwise wouldn’t have them, eventually leading to amendments to
the U.S. Constitution that expanded those rights to black males, and eventually
women.
The concept of freeholder back then was to protect the
community from interlopers, people who might wander into a region with no
vested interest, influencing law without any stake in the game. Since property
owners invested their life savings into a community, they should have – in this
thinking – have the most say.
As non-property owners became more invested through labor
and other means, their rights increased.
But after the Civil War, a new dangerous breed came into
existence, bankers protected by politicians who found both property owners and
labor easy pickings. As before the reforms of the mid 1800s, most laborers
could pick up and move when local taxes became intolerable. Not so with
property owners, who turned out to be sitting ducks – especially small property
owners without political influence, who get driven out by redevelopment.
My great great grandfather was part of the redevelopment
scam that redeveloped farms into housing for mill workers in the late 1800s,
who then became the bread and butter for government as they got taxed for the
privilege of owning a lot in places like Lodi – many of whom got displaced
later by newer and bigger developments designed to bring in “a better” class of
wealth that can be taxed at an even higher rate, with banks financing huge
luxury developments for this better class of people to move into.
For the small guy, this is a game of musical chairs, lured
into the game by promise of success, only to find he no longer has a seat at
the table.
This is not the poorest of the poor who get the most grief,
but that middle man, the worker who after World War II found moderate success, that
car in the garage and chicken in the pot, lured into the illusion of the
American dream by media advertisement we can’t resist, a two-car garage, a
color TV, credit card debt rather than layaway.
Even the small businesses find themselves caught in this
race of rats. If you don’t keep growing, you die.
Donald used to brag about how he started his business in his
father’s garage with $400. Now, he’s worth millions and still looks over his
shoulder for fear he might not be able to keep up, even though he has a
remarkable house in the hills of West Caldwell, and a wife any man would be proud
of, and a son that he hopes will turn out to be someone great someday.
Donald is clever and knows how to swim with sharks. He doesn’t
always talk about the connections he’s made since his family moved out of
Newark, or those of his brother who still does business there.
Being Jewish helped him because of the close ties such
families have, which many others do not have, especially blacks, who come out
of shattered families and many of whom are suspicious of success, bringing down
fellow blacks who manage to find success with terms like “uncle tom.”
My boss at the card company seemed to envy Donald and hoped
to build his own little empire as the regional manager, only to have some corporate
big shot from Dallas steal the chair out from under him by closing the New
Jersey warehouse.
It’s difficult to build on something you do not own.
Unfortunately, the world if filled with dreamers like him,
the middle people in a society that builds power (business or government) on a pyramid,
the more important people standing on the backs and shoulders of the lesser
important, and the more ruthless you are, the more likely you are to become one
of the people on top.
Everything is a weeding out process, big fish eating small
fish, until only the most ruthless thrive.
Some people become cogs in the great machine (as was pointed
out in a protest years ago in Berkeley), designed to live their lives with
dreams they can never achieve, and yet whose backs that allow the great men to
stand on.
Many hoped the 1960s would change all that, allow some
people not suited to be cogs to thrive – allowing some people to win the lottery
of success through art, music, sports and such, little realizing that the same game
of musical chairs exists in those, giving the most ruthless the best chance of
success – not always the most talented.
Hank dreamed of becoming a Broadway singer. He performed a
number of times in local theater, but got pushed aside by more ambitious,
partly because he clung to a cog-like job and was too scared to take a leap
into the shark tank, and perhaps not tough enough even if he did.
We hear a lot of stories about the poorest of the poor, and
how we ought to take care of them, provide them with programs that will keep
them from starvation, even though we in the United States have the richest poor
in the world and the most programs to keep them free of starvation, while we
have the richest of richest and the poorest of poor standing on the backs of
workers like Hank
Bankers do their best to protect the rich, knowing that the
richest of the rich are the grease that makes the economy run, and government
officials protect the poorest of the poor, establishing programs that guarantee
them health services, food, rent, heat, while the people in the middle, the working
people find themselves caught in the middle, overcharged by landlords, over
taxes by government, sometimes lucky enough to win the lottery and fall into
the category of poorest of the poor so they can get government help as well.
Most of us are hamsters running on a wheel inside this
industrial cage, doing everything just to keep pace with where we are, too scared
to jump into the race of rats that might make us rich, much more terrified to
fall back into the pool of serious poverty, seemingly to have neither banker
nor government official to look out for our interests, called names when we try
to protect ourselves.
All this comes at a time when I’ve transitioned from blue
collar worker into that limbo of art, where I dream big but have little to show
for it, scared, too, by the idea of success, knowing that if I manage to
achieve it, I’ll be a lot like Donald, looking over my shoulder to see just how
far behind failure is and how close it is to catching up with me.
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