Inspiration can strike in the oddest places sometimes. I was sitting on my front porch on a chilly Halloween afternoon, waiting for the first few trick-or-treaters, worried I wouldn’t have a column ready in time for my next deadline.
I was worried, dear readers, that I might phone it in.
I put the laptop away (yes of course I took it out on the porch with me, because what is more frightening than a leftist with access to the internet?) and got ready to hand out some candy before my kids and wife got home. I had decided to try something different for the kids’ dinner this year, painting their Chinese-style steamed buns with orange food coloring to look like pumpkins.
Yes, I made Chinese food for Halloween dinner. As we mentioned, I’m a dirty lefty globalist SJW, et cetera, et cetera insert your favorite talking point here. We even ate with chopsticks.
As I ran indoors quick to paint the buns for the kids, I saw a group of kids skitter over to the house next door, coming from the general direction of our house. Knowing how kids can be, I rushed outside to see that most of the candy had been skimmed off the top of the plastic pumpkins I had left out for trick-or-treaters. The way these chuckleheads scurried around the neighborhood, the way they pounced on other folks’ offerings, and the way they avoided my gaze on their way back up the opposite side of the street told me everything I needed to know: chuckleheads confirmed.
But it made me laugh: if this was rebellion, it wasn’t much of one. All they seemed to do was grab the top layer, made up almost entirely of licorice, and dash. If they had stopped to chat or even ask, they would have found out that I would have let them take as much as they wanted (socialist nightmare that I am), as long as they didn’t trash the place, and that lower down in the bucket were the really choice treats. Unfortunately, I don’t think choice treats was the goal of these chuckleheads, it was just to get and go.
Which, of course, reminded me of the worst aspects of capitalism. It isn’t about doing the best thing or getting the best stuff, but just about getting what you can now with no thought to prudence or long-term sensibility. It wasn’t even so much the using of it, it was just in the having and the taking, but ironically this short-sighted approach to simply getting keeps you from getting the best stuff. We’ve currently got a mindset in place where what you can get right now is automatically better than what you can get later, even if what you get later is greater or better, because we reward those who are smart enough to try to cheat the system and mock those who eventually get caught.
This sort of “gotta get mine” attitude just leads to an entire system where everyone is looking to get everything for themselves, whatever the cost and as soon as possible, and then immediately throwing anyone under the bus who gets caught, which just tells all of your associates that they should throw you under the bus when you get caught, and so on.And the reward isn’t even worth it. This is how we get a fiasco like WeWork, with a CEO that swindled tons of money out of the company, driving it into the ground and making out like a bandit… but then the company didn’t have enough money left over to pay out packages to the employees that lost their jobs. An actually functioning company would probably have paid more in dividends in the long term but, hey, I gotta get mine NOW. We’ve got a whole society of people looking to just get the candy and run, but then they’re stuck with cheap licorice instead of high quality chocolate.
The question is, which would you rather have?
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