It seems churlish to criticize the recent news about the philanthropy of Bill & Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett. One can applaud their generosity, and especially their support for projects to help with children’s and women’s healthcare, to fight preventable diseases and to help poor, broken schools while still being uneasy about it.
It’s far more interesting to think about what this news says about what is wrong with us as a people. It’s important to remember that while progressive multi-billionaires like Gates and Buffett are funding good works, there are just as many, like Richard Mellon Scaife and other right-wing activists, who bankroll less admirable causes. In fact, those on the right have made it a mission to destroy the government’s ability to do anything for those who most need the help, leaving a huge void that Gates and Buffett seem to wish to fill.
It’s not healthy for a society to be so neglectful of the commonweal, so worshipful of cults of personality and an oppressive and greedy upper caste.
More and more, it is plain that we live in a new Robber Baron era, that we’ve run headlong back to feudalism. Some of us are lucky enough to serve a Lord or Lady who deigns to provide some of the better things in life to their serfs/workers, but as has been true throughout history, far more are left to subsist on the crumbs or cake dropped from the tables of their “betters”.
In fact, to take a step back, it’s wrong to say “the government’s ability” when discussing public works, public welfare. It’s important to remember that in a Republic like this, government is supposed to be all of us. That we neglect public health, basic healthcare, education and so many other important things speaks poorly of us. That we have VOTED for a political system that bleeds the greater masses dry and funnels the fruits of their labor up to a small, well-heeled minority is a sign of a mass psychosis. We really have, as a people, little or nothing in common besides the things we vote for … our system of government is the only thing that makes Americans American. We don’t have the ties of long histories or a shared religion or race or even one language to knit us together as a people, and we never have. What we had was a ghostly assertion of “We The People …”
For centuries, in fits and starts, we’ve made moves to broaden that “We” to more and more of the human beings who live within our borders. For some strange reason, for the last few decades, we’ve changed our mind about that. So many of us are content to pretend that when a small number of people, by stint of birth, wealth, luck, guile, hard work or ruthlessness, gather more and more of life’s blessings to themselves it makes us ALL more free. It’s plain, as you travel through our decaying inner cities, or through our abandoned rural towns, or travel to our neglected national parks, that this isn’t so. We have offered our life’s blood up to a small and voracious group of ticks, and we express gratitude when some of them give some drops of that blood back.
What the hell is wrong with us?
Over and over again we blame the victims when we, through our representatives, fail them. We punish them again and again for our lack of will, our failures of imagination, our insincerity when we mouth the words “We The People”. We don’t believe it, none of it. We run away from each other, locking ourselves away in our tract homes, hurtling past each other in our tank-like SUVs, screaming at our neighbors behind the store counter to vent our frustrations. Gates and Buffett are left to fill that gap because we hate and fear one another, because we have no faith in one another, because we have decided that we’d rather be customers or victims or consumers rather than citizens.
One can admire the generosity revealed in this latest news, of the decision by these very wealthy people to act as citizens in a way that so few of us do, and still be saddened that it is so desperately needed.
