Modern America seems obsessed with money and wealth. I don’t mean being conscious and careful about one’s family finances – income, debts, investments, and the like. Everyone in every country has such concerns, and they are probably greater in poorer countries and in those with inflationary pressures >100% per year. No, I mean the obsession with acquiring more no matter the level of one’s wealth.
According to Forbes, there are some 22 million millionaires and 735 billionaires in America. The average household has 2.5 people; so that suggests that perhaps 55 million Americans (roughly 16% of our populace) lives in a household with a net worth of a million or more dollars. The other 84% are not so fortunate. Yet, many of those with the most wealth seem to behave as if they need more.
This makes for an interesting dynamic. The wealthy often hold the ultra-wealthy in the highest esteem. I suppose that they imagine themselves economically challenged billionaires-in-waiting. Their idols are the ilk of Donald Trump (a faux billionaire) and Elon Musk (an actual billionaire albeit a faux human being). And that is the idolatry. Christian Nationalists are the worst, I think. They seem to imbue great wealth with an aura of merit no matter how that wealth was accumulated – grift, cheating, tax evasion, criminality, exploitation of workers or the law or the Earth itself.
Don’t get me wrong; it isn’t only the already wealthy who behave as if the only true god is Mammon. The impoverished, American middle class does as well. Many are aspiring millionaires whose dreams of having more have been frustrated, they believe, by dark forces – immigrants, Jews, Muslims, Blacks, Latinos, Gays, and other groups that they imagine are hoarding the wealth that would otherwise be coming to them. They are children of the golden calf just as much as the already millionaires are.
It’s a sad state of affairs, and I know not how to help set it right.
I resigned myself many years ago that I would be a pauper and not a prince ( monetarily) but I have tried to be rich in spirit and in purpose, I failed at that endeavor more often than I care to admit ( mostly to my myself ) but I did succeed in overcoming difficult times and challenges. Somehow I have made it to old age with some of the wisdom that comes with the status of “Senior Citizen”.
Though many still argue for the merits of materialism and the faux grandiosity of being “rich” I have learned one thing, at least one thing, in my travels; in the end, when we inch ourselves towards eternity, what really matters is the love you gave and the love you received, all else fades and crumbles as your eyes close for the last time.
Agreed.