Envy

Mitt Romney thinks I am jealous of him. 

He’s right.

I’d like to be able to fire service companies that don’t deliver according to my standards.  I’d like to be able to fire my insurance company if they won’t pay for a procedure or test I’d like to have done or for meds I’d like to have.  I can’t.  My insurance plan came with my job, chosen for me by someone else who decided what I could afford and what I could not.  I have no real say, and I surely can’t afford to go out and buy insurance on my own, affordable care act or no. 

Not that I’d get insurance from another company anyway, what with the whole pre-existing condition and all.  And it probably wouldn’t be much cheaper either.

I’d like to change a lot of things in my life.  I’d like to pay less for groceries, but commodity traders and other assorted corporate forces keep driving prices upward because they can.  I’d like to not go bankrupt sending my children to college, in fact, I’d like to be sending them to better colleges, but I can’t.  Of course, Mitt and his friends keep telling me that college is a privilege, not a right, and not everyone should get to go there after all. 

Mitt’s right.  I’m extremely jealous of him and of lots of other people who live in a world where they can get what they want and do what they want all the time. 

The question is whether or not that’s a good thing.

I understand perfectly well that it is the nature of a free society that some people will always have more than others – more money, more power, more control.  I get that, and at some level, I’m okay with it.  People are entitled to the fruits of their labors. 

But when does inequality stop becoming an incentive for aspiration and become a barrier to justice?  For that’s the real problem – not that I am jealous of Mitt Romney, who can run for political office now because he doesn’t have to worry about paying his mortgage while I can’t because I do, but that I have absolutely no opportunity to ever reach such a place in my life, nor do the other ninety-nine percent of people like me, and especially the many people even worse-off than I am.  The issue is not that some of us are richer than others, but that the benefits of wealth – success, power, control – have become the sole property of a very few, consolidated, restricted, secure behind gated communities and obscure tax loopholes. 

It’s not that I’m jealous that you got yours, Mitt.  It’s that you’ve got mine now, too.  And in this season of being told what is destroying America, let us clearly speak this one undeniable truth: as we watch old totalitarian regimes all over the world collapse because the many who were kept from power and wealth could take it no longer, let us not fail to observe the same log in our own eye.  Wealth and prosperity are not the same things.  Separating our society into those who have much and those who have some is not the same as separating it into those who have all and those who have none.

Do not scorn my jealousy, Mr. Romney.  If you want to lead this country, fix it.    

The Lord enters into judgment with the elders and princes of his people: It is you who have devoured the vineyard; the spoil of the poor is in your houses. What do you mean by crushing my people, by grinding the face of the poor? says the Lord God of hosts. Isaiah 3:14-15