Comments on: Not everyone in America has 100 billion dollars, I promise

By: Tish G

Tish G — Sat, 02 Jul 2005 17:18:17 +0000

If Sam Walton’s 20 billion dollar wife showed up at our door and went into our kitchen to make us a pot of grits at 6:30 one morning, I still wouldn’t think she was a nice, humble woman. Quite a showperson, yeah, a hustler, just like her husband was. I’d say, “Look at that hustler in there boiling grits and trying to make us think she doesn’t care about her family’s 100 billion dollar empire built on slave labor wages abroad and working homeless wages here.”

HA! I love this!

Having worked amont The Very Wealthy at one point in my life, I have met women like this (and men). They think they are oh, so very homey, when they are really just grandstanding to make it look like they’re down home.

I’d rather know a rich person who had his/her well-paid great Southern cook come over to make my grits than have some busy-body grandstander poking around my place….

which is only marginally larger than yours. and, because it is a third floor walk-up, has slanted ceilings. Good thing the ceiling’s high, or else I’d be a hunchbacked bat.

By: site admin

site admin — Wed, 29 Jun 2005 21:35:03 +0000

We have those big Norwegian sewer rats strolling about the alleys but we’ve fortunately not had any rodent problems.

I agree that wealth doesn’t equal happiness, but certain securities (health care etc) and opportunities that money alone makes available in our no-barter society are, well, nice to have. The line of “Money doesn’t make you happy, in fact you can be happier without” is handed out often enough by the rich and strikes me as a deflector against complaints from the masses about distribution inequalities, unfair laws etc. And when the line is tossed around by the poor, it seems often enough a product of having drunk the kool-aid.

I just this afternoon thoroughly mucked up, with one careless click of the mouse, a database of months and months of work and am doing things like waxing the floor, anything to not think about what I’ve done, while trying to think of what I can do to salvage the situation and not start raging.

By: Jim McCulloch

Jim McCulloch — Wed, 29 Jun 2005 20:45:03 +0000

Well, I don’t have a picture of the kitchen of the shack we once lived in on Onion Creek, but the kitchen was very small, but unlike yours did not have strong plaster walls, hence mice could get in, and did. We discovered their presence after they chewed a hole in the insulation of the stove andmade a nest in it, via the unforgettable smell of heated mouse urine, when we turned on the stove.
I doubt if Miz Walton would actually care to live the lives or genuine poor people.

On the other hand, and WRT your previous post, we Buddhists think that one of the main causes of human unhappiness is being consumed by greed and grasping. The paradox of accumulating vast wealth is that, psychologically speaking, it does not guarantee that you’ll be happier than someone who has a closet kitchen. Maybe the opposite.

At its core our economic system seems to me to be profoundly irrational, based on a struggle to accumulate something that does not really help anyone live a happy life.

Although it’s nice not to have mice in your kitchen.