Sacrifice

With some time off this week and, until today, nice weather, I’ve had time to spend sitting out on the front porch, reading an actual book (with printed pages and everything! I didn’t even have to plug it into surge protector!). Why I picked “Walden,” I’m not sure; certainly it turned out to be a serendipitous choice because it gave my mental kaleidoscope a half-twist and my whole view changed.

Perhaps most important, it changed my view of the “1%” to whom the share of America’s wealth has so inequitably shifted (or been transferred to by tax policies, among other factors). Instead, now I see that our corporate leaders have all embraced Thoreau’s espousal of a simpler, less encumbered life, and collectively they are striving to channel American workers to the same. In order to do this, they sacrifice their own potential freedom from luxury, opulence and all the hindrances to a truly “good” and “well-lived” life so as to preserve our freedom from the same. They know, as Thoreau said, that we are often more possessed by our possessions than the other way around, so they struggle mightily to ensure that we can never afford to be encumbered by so many of them.

It strikes me also that many of them have taken up Michelle Obama’s fight against childhood obesity. A diet of beans and rice would be a healthy one, and so the children of the 99% will be channeled economically to beans and rice, simultaneously sparing them life-threatening temptation of richer fare. If to do that means keeping the 99% from being able to afford a more varied diet, well, the 1% will sacrifice by carrying more of the burdensome profit themselves.

It stuns me that I’ve missed until now the incredible generosity of the 1% and how they’ve so sacrificed their own freedom from wealth in order to ensure our own. It is the economic equivalent of throwing themselves on a hand grenade, just to save the rest of us. I am humbled by my belated recognition of this.