My aunt works as a nanny for a very wealthy family. A few days ago she took us on a tour of their home, including the 11 bedrooms and 11 baths, swimming pool, elevator, sauna, exercise room, theatre, full-time housekeeper, personal chef, maintenance man, gardener and driver for the limousine which was accompanied in the driveway by a Cadillac, a Lexus and a Mercedes. I found myself asking: What did they do to deserve all this?
It is a silly question, of course, implying that we each get what we deserve, that privilege is doled out according to merit. It is an idea that is deeply ingrained in our culture. We want to believe that life is fair. When someone does something we judge to be wrong we think: He'll get what's coming to him. When something good happens to us we think: I deserve this.
Yet we see evidence to the contrary all the time. Bad things happen to good people everyday. We don't get what we deserve. We get what we get. Peace seems to lie in accepting what we get and releasing it when it is time to let go.
I was always intrigued by the Rolling Stones song, you can't always get what you want but if you try sometimes you get what you need. It is so true that the idea of wealth as a measure of our merit is basic to the functioning of this country. The wealthy class buys this, the low-income folks have always known it to be not true (since they work hard and get no where). The middle class are the ones who have really bought into it--thinking that if they just worked harder, they, too, could be wealthy. Now that bubble has been burst and it will be interesting to see where the country goes from here. I got to say, 11 bedrooms is obscene unless you are housing the homeless or battered women or runaway adolescents or old folks or someone in need of a safe place to be.
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