America's for the Downtrodden to Step on Someone Else for a While

America’s for the Downtrodden to Step on Someone Else for a While

By Rick Hilber

I live in a housing cooperative. I am a shareholder in the corporation that is my landlord. I am a tenant. This is as close as anyone wants to come in my country to being a communist. That is communist with a small “c” and without the attitude about religion which makes communism a religion of godless materialism (which is what capitalism is in one’s disinterested understanding of economics). The essence here is the difference between being well and doing well and having it “all”. I think the real point I have to make is buried under way too much human detritus!

Americans are not communists, and my life in my cooperative has firmly established in my mind that we have no business trying to live like a community of owners who have to defer to the collective will. But beyond that and the histrionics of being driven mad by selfishness among co-owners, I have reached the firm conviction that communism (with a small “c”) is like capitalism (oops, another “c” word), both of which have winners and losers. The winners end up with all the marbles, and the rest of us have our soup lines. Boy, is that my punch line, or what?


What that looks like is - Joseph Stalin on one side and Andrew Carnegie on the other. They are both bad for the environment, degrading it, and subverting it to their own self-aggrandizement. Such is the human condition. To prove my point Joseph Stalin ended up in both a hot and a cold war, the hot war with a maniacal dictator like himself, and the other with western capitalism over who has what and who isn’t going to get it or “any” for that matter! By the way, Joe’s statues make good grapeshot, and Andrew’s philanthropy makes western Christianity look like redemption itself!


Remember, those of you who read, that Warren Buffett, capitalist par excellence, knows beyond knowing that you can’t take “it” with you, and leaving it to your children and grandchildren will destroy what cogency they each should have as worthwhile human beings! I think I know why Warren has gotten it right. At ninety plus years of life, he and his buddy Charles T. Munger, did it together. They were always about the fun of getting, not having and spending for itself, and as I would have it, about being, not having. Warren knows that if one is into having, what you have will have you! You would spend all your time worrying about others trying to take from you what you have accumulated, for one thing! For me to find a communist of similar wisdom, I have to go back to St. Benedict, and the root of monasticism, the desert fathers of the early Church (that would be what the early Christian religion reduced itself to when the world itself had been had by the Roman Empire which is the triumph of a bunch of white guys over everybody else - much like our Wall Street crowd which ironically takes welfare bail outs as needed).


Our modern atheists do have a little connumdrum. They can buy into having or being. If they deal with the ethics of that, I am amazed at how Christian communists and Christian capitalists end up in the same place. On the other hand: our modern Christians do seem to shoot themselves in the foot if they lose sight of the economic premise of Jesus Christ himself, the one who originally taught us that being, not having, is probably fifty-one percent of human capacity to be a higher life form than a snake!


So what is this essay trying to say? I’ll tell you in a nut shell. Doing what is right by yourself and your neighbor (or enemy) is what defines us as a higher life form. It takes thoughtfulness, and it takes mindfulness, and it takes mercy both for yourself and another. Marriage is I think the best example of that of which I speak. I for one wasted at least half of my married days focused on having a wife to keep (which I am miserable at doing) and being a husband (which oddly enough doesn’t even need a wife to keep to be fully enacted, lived out, and appreciated).


The best things in life are free and without appreciation either (which means no one else wants them). Been on an early morning walk and watched the sunrise lately? It will be you and maybe just one other on the high bridge over Saint Paul (that would be the city) watching the sun rise over the hills of Pigs Eye Lake just past the airport where the corporate jets are coming in for that really, really big meeting on the fortieth floor of the Wells Fargo building.


So today, be a dad, be a grandfather, be a lover of humanity. Don’t suffer even one minute about what you do or don’t have (including advantages over others), and walk in humility and confidence into the day which by the way God created just for you to be your very best self. If you should read this, it is my self-talk (that would be No. 307) and is not available for other than the sharing it with others. God bless you too for that sharing of hard earned wisdom - should it be in you to pass it on (the “it” being love of your fellows while you are yet here, not above [heaven’s for Christians only I hear], or down under the ground - which is after all our common lot).


Oh yah, one last thing. Don’t bother sharing this with a politician. They will parrot it back to you if they know it’s what you want to hear. Geez, is democracy not great? They even pay you for your vote! A young guy stops me on the street to ask if he can join the Tea Party. I tell him to stay away from the facts, do not subscribe to more than one newstation’s point of view, and let pundits pander to your worst fears about minorities, women, and immigrants. That should do it, I tell him. He walks off with a smile on his face, and looks back at me and says, “Coming from a overeducated bum, that’s not half bad!”

©2015 by its author Richard J. (Rick) HIlber