Masters of the Universe

This morning I drove up to attend the monthly community action committee meeting at Lacoochee School. (Oh, horrors! Community organizing!). As I went along Cummer Road towards the school I noticed the many Christmas creches in front of the houses. I slowed down right after the railroad tracks to look at a peeling vivid green block house surrounded with tan beaten earth. A dirt colored pit bull was chained out front, out of range of the creche that was carefully arranged in front and surrounded with hay. Somehow, this Christmas presentation, so tasteful even on the bare ground, so brave and affirmative, brought tears to my eyes.
The meeting of folks dedicated to helping this small rural community and school reported on their progress in establishing a boy scout troop, a football program, how the Girls and Boys club had a Christmas party the night before. The food pantry needs, needs, needs. A group of volunteers opens a daily office to help people get their food stamps and sign up for unemployment.
The school principal, a woman whose real talent is community organizing, affirmed all the participants. A tour de force, she has her heart and mind firmly set on what will be best for those 600 kids in her Title One school where over 95% of them are on free lunch and breakfast.
We volunters do what we can, and it is never enough. Here are kids who have never even been to Tampa! Some of them are always hungry and they don't even have the basic necessities. On the principal's wish list are sweat suits from Walmart so the kids can be warm!
After the meeting we were served a fine lunch with many many pecan pies. I took my plate and sat down with "Miss Lily", a huge black grandmother. She's huge in the community and is the mother, grandmother and foster mother of many. She's a person one listens to. I just loved her stories and I hated to leave.
Back home, I stretched out on the porch couch with the dog to read the New York Times. On the front page was an article by Louise Story about the compensation of the Wall Street wizards, the masters of the universe. We have known about these excesses for a few weeks but in today's story it was so detailed and spread out in front of me I leapt up in outrage!
I want to know a few things about this greed. Did these people grow up with no values, i.e. knowing right from wrong? Were these people so entitled from day one they didn't have to think about anyone but themselves? Did they go to Brearley or Choate or any of the other super expensive schools and then to an Ivy college and think they could just continue being oblivious to general human kindness and consideration? Did they think that having corporate jets and personal yachts and multiple homes and expensive cosmetic surgery and Patek watches was o.k.? Did they ever think of the concerns of such places as Lacoochee? ( One tennis bracelet would fund a field trip for ninety kids) No, they were concerned with the silliness of having the correct $500 stroller for their child, and to make a small bow to the vast unwashed, they spent a few of their many millions at charity balls.
There are a few vastly rich people who have made incredible difference in our society. Bill Gates and Warren Buffet come to mind, and there are others. But still, one wonders how many hundreds of thousands of others were the backs on which these titans walked.
I think it is going to take a long time for our society to correct itself. I still do see many Americans, like the folks in Lacoochee, who truly do know how to do the right thing. Maybe our models will have to come from the bottom up. Certainly, our models have not come from the financiers. We will all have to speak out when we see that the emporer has no clothes. We really knew that many people could not afford those mini mansions and we really knew that those New York people were fakes. But we chose not to see.
I remember one time that my husband's boss said in an economics discussion, "Everyone wants to be comfortble." Yes, sure. The thing is, though, we have to make a society where everyone can be comfortable, have a home, food, work.
I'd like to have these masters of the universe, those failed Wall Street financiers, these cynical multimillionaires have to spend some time living among the homeless under the bridges of America.
We are all responsible and we can't escape that. We can blame it on Bush, but we let this disaster happen because we were all too comfortable. I can't wait for Obama!