Distracted by what we tell ourselves

What if instead of distilling a philosophy of life based on what people say their ideals and values are, we looked at what people actually do – the way people live and actually spend their time and energy? What if we looked at the greatest society in the history of the world?

We say that we all have a right to pursue happiness but we don’t give everyone a job, or merely the opportunity to work somehow for themselves so that they could earn with their time and effort the money needed to purchase, not just happiness, but their very survival. We insist that the market must be free. That freedom, we imply, is sacred, not human lives.

Yet some easily find exceptions to the idea that people should work for their living. Many are willing to say that anyone has the right to inherit and spend money they never worked a day in their life for.

Clearly the rights of accumulated property overrule the rights of people to earn even their daily bread. But even if it weren’t ordained, our economic system must be the best, the winners say. Look at what wonders we have produced with our accumulated wealth and your labor – when we could benefit from your labor and minimize its costs, that is.

Of course I’m not suggesting that people shouldn’t be entitled to enjoy the fruits of their labor, their property protected, and even shared with their children. Everyone should be granted that opportunity. Everyone. But many of our stated rights are clearly not inalienable when you realize how much of people’s opportunities depend on to which family they are born and how wealth actually accumulates.

There need be no class warfare if we would make better attempts to structure our society fairly. But if, at some point, the rich will have taken too much and the poor will realize they have not be allowed their share, or even the opportunity to earn something close to their share, there will be strife.

So far our society’s repeated talk about freedom and opportunity has kept most of us from noticing that it’s not just life that isn’t fair. We continue to accept somehow that it must be mostly their own fault if people are poor. Or we’ve accepted the idea that we don’t have the power to make our society more fair. But in history, we can see that sometimes rights are claimed and won.

Some people died along the way to give Barack Obama his chance, for one example.

Some of us get much more than we deserve and some of us get less. Look who gets to make the rules, and look who gets to decide what’s fair. Ask yourself who decides whose time and energy is worth more and whose is worth less. If you think the market of opportunities for pursuing happiness is free, look again.

The middle class, moderately comfortable, mostly passive, separates the rich from the poor. If they disappear, or begin to realize that their interests are more in line with the poor, watch out.

Humans will live with a lot of hardship, but when they think someone else is taking their rightful share, there will be strife.

Martin Luther King may rise up again. This time his parents might be from Mexico. Everything but the details and the dates are already written in the history books. More of us should have talked less and looked more closely at how we actually live – and how people have come to decide when they’d finally had enough of all the talk in the face of obvious human unfairness, and they struck back.