Well dignity I suppose

I have written the following in the hope that Jack might find it a worthwhile tool to promote my useful qualities, or his useful connections, to the union movement for whom he has recently gone to work. I have purposely written it in the first person, identifying thus with those who I wish to influence rather than as the despised underclass I represent. Wadd’ya think How-am-I-goin.

Don’t you feel that it is time, now well into the second half of the post war decade, that the haves began to pay respect to those have nots to whom they owe such a great debt. Just as surely as the law enforcement industry from the judges through lawyers, police , sheriffs, warders and all their attendant staff and institution are dependant on crime and practising criminals, their crop, their stock in trade so to speak, so are the well to do dependant on the vast majority of nere-do-wells for their privileged status.

At the end of the Great (WW2) War as shell shocked nations began the mighty task of rebuilding, it seems to one such as I, born in that year, that there was great dignity in the efforts of individuals working to build homes families and workplaces, a dignity from which was born the myth of the battler. Of course there were also those of great wealth many of whom had profited from war but vast respect was apportioned not to them but to the many who struggled as best the could to rebuild society. Nowadays, and for some decades sadly, a cult of riches has dominated not just here in Sydney Australia, but across the globe. A cult that has no time for the poor, that belittles their value and indeed does all in its power to make them feel guilt for their state in life. The philosophy of Marx and its implementation by and Lenin, Engles and Trotsky raised a revolution that failed a decade or two ago and this failure was embraced by the rich as justification for their mantra as proclaimed by Hollywood’s Gordon Gecko that Greed is good and by default, lack thereof (read poor) is bad.

Now it does not take very great intelligence to see and recognise that vast wealth is absolutely dependent on a large, extra large, pool of poor. Take Australia today as an easy example. Continuously wealthy and able to cruise through the speed humps of the Asian meltdown the Dot-com bust and even it seems the current sub prime mortgage crisis decimating world markets. How? By selling filthy coal, iron ore and other minerals, not to mention gas, to upwardly mobile China whose population outnumbering us 250,000 to 1 must wait at least two more generations to come close to our standard of living. Do we as an affluent nation owe these 250,000 to one people a debt of gratitude? I think so. Let’s look at a scale not so grand. The average Australian wage is in the vicinity of $55,000 per year. Ignoring spikes by the C.E.O. of Macquarie Bank and like this still leaves a great number of folk on over $100,000 PA a great deal wealthier than the vast majority of their peers on less than $25,000. Who you say are these less than $25K earners. Well students serving you your meal and coffee, the single parent minding your kids, the recent migrant washing your clothes, the apprentice repairing your car, the backpacker picking your fruit and the senior in fluorescent vest herding you at Town Hall Station. Imagine if you can a nation, no town, where everyone earned as you do $100K+. You’d be fixing your own car, minding your own kids and I don’t see how you’d get your dry cleaning done. Earning $100K wouldn’t seem so flash anymore would it.

Would it be so hard to appoint to these, not so fortunate as us, a degree of dignity? Could we possibly ignore their dollar value and approach them as equals? Do we have to repeat past mistakes, to re-invent aristocracies because the simple pleasures of wealth, a beautiful home and good food on the table, are not enough? Must we elevate ourselves by imagining an underclass and transpose to them the blame for their own miserable existence so that we might feel that much better? I think we could rise above such base desire and with our $100G+ per anum embrace loftier philosophies like Libertie, Egalite, Fraternitie, those of that earlier revolution, with which we found little fault.

THE philosopher