This Has To Stop

We're at the top. The very top. This isn't some crazy game, or a fucked up movie. The world is currently so poor that people making $32,000 a year are in the top 1% of the world's wealthy. 

I'm glad my parents told me I was going to be smarter than them someday. Not all parents are like that. Some parents want to feel superior. “I'm right and you're wrong, I'm big and you're small, and there's nothing you can do about it.” -Roald Dhal. I feel like at times my parents were blown away by my intelligence and didn't quite know what to do. I relate to it now that I have a son. 

I know why people couldn't handle me as a child. People can't handle what I have to say in the world of adults. I was an only child, little girl. The daughter of a feminist, raised in her successful family business, in my beautiful idealistic hometown, Silverton, New Jersey. I spoke like an adult as a child. My mother never told me otherwise. There were no limitations set on my ability to behave or interact around or with adults. It wasn't until I was a teen that I found out women and children were supposed to speak when spoken to, or be seen and not heard.

There were times I remember, when other adults who were not my mother, would say things and have conversations as if I was not there. I was hurt by the things they said, but also their ability to not see me, right there in front of them. I would not have wanted to be a child who is treated like that all the time. As a parent, on the other side of the wall between adults and children, I see adults ignore their children, or tell them "the adults are talking". It hurts me every time for the child being brushed aside. My mother never said that to me. I notice she ignores me sometimes and listens to my son when he talks over me. Instead of remaining annoyed, I have learned to listen more closely to him. 

I love being a mother because it means I get to experience my friends' kids and my nieces and nephews more closely. We are not planning for their future now, and we should be. We have mothers wracked by poverty and depression, and often illness related to environmental and mental stress on the body. We used to see these diseases in much older age brackets. 

I had this wonderful childhood. Even as a child of divorce, I always felt lucky. I never experienced violence first hand, but I knew of it. I had two very big, very loving families with a bunch of cousins my age. 

All of this is how I wound up so angry as a teenager. Things were perfect until 6th grade. When they divide up the boys and the girls. When I started to learn the truth about the world in which we live. When you raise a kid in Pleasantville, you can expect outrage when they start to find out the truth. 

We lie to our kids. We send them to school and have them learn about Martin Luther King, Jr. without his grizzly murder that could have easily been prevented by the secret service. We tell them about George Washington and the Revolutionary War and our triumph over tyranny while smoothing past the massacre of the Native Americans. We teach them the Civil War and Abe Lincoln without the politics behind it and why he was murdered. 

We act like these things are ancient history, like all these problems are solved. To a child, time moves very slow. Nothing comes fast enough. They think, "Wow that was so long ago, my world must be so different." And we allow it. But it is not so long ago. And the world is not so different. When they find out, they come to us for answers and we have none. When my son comes to me for answers, I will be ready. 

We're being robbed by our utilities and our politicians are complicit. Many of them from families who own utilities. The fundamentals of being alive in the modern world are being used to make profit at our expense. How can we continue to blame the saddest, most sick among us? The drug addict, the mentally ill, the obese, they take the heat from this fucked up world but they have no control over any of this. That is why they are sick. People need to feel in control of their own lives. They need to feel they have real choices. 

We are taught in this world that we must pay for good will. Some of us have no more money left to give. Our goals should be to leave ideas for future generations or invent things that change or improve someone's life. Instead we focus on Net Worth, Yearly Income, or Return On Investment. These things are meaningless. 

When the dot com bubble burst I told my dad that the stock market was nothing more than glorified gambling, I was 16 years old. He responded with outrage. A man of the unions, who never thought of the world as an entirely fair couldn't accept the reality I had discovered. Good thing I brought my revelations to my dad first. I thought I had figured out the problems. That things were simple to fix. They are simple to fix. What I didn't understand, the hard part, was the you had to get people to admit things were wrong, which is close to impossible. I learned to be more aware of my audience and what they were ready to handle.

People will put up with some insane shit before moving on and admitting defeat. 75% of people living in the dust bowl stayed for the entire decade of the storms. That's how I know we'll remain in the path of the hurricanes until we fix out planet. 

My husband and I have discussed how our generation in school learned, we were going to plant a tree, hold hands, sing, and save the world with recycling. We both agreed wholeheartedly, "What the fuck happened?" 

Profit. That's what. At the expense of our children's futures and safety.

Once we have enough, it should all go back in the collective pot. No one should accumulate money. Accumulated money is essentially nothing. Money is the representation of the exchange of goods and services. Therefore, stagnant money is nothing. Absolve it. The dollar would be worth enough for those at the bottom to live once again. We need money to be an advanced society. But it shouldn't fluctuate up and down. Things definitely should not have this constant upward momentum. Things can not continually gain worth forever. A gallon of milk should not cost $40 when my son is my age. This has to stop.