Billie Holliday and Arthur Herzog, Jr. wrote a beautiful song in 1939: “God Bless the Child“. My first (and best) introduction to the piece was in 1969, when I first heard it played by Blood, Sweat & Tears. It still rocks.
Them that’s got, shall get. Them that’s not, shall lose.
The drift of those words is very plain and simple, and the notion goes back thousands of years; probably back to whenever and whatever we can agree upon as the beginning of humanity. A crafty appendage is usually dragged along as well, and that’s the pigheaded idea that both sides of the equation deserve their desserts; the hard-working, industrious folks make (and thus, merit) a pile of money, and the shiftless, not-so-industrious lose what little they had. (Also merited.)
The problem with that kind of thinking reminds me of another great song; “It Ain’t Necessarily So“.
Here’s the deal. There are different ways of working. (Duh.) Some people, such as professors, writers and physicians accomplish their primary tasks by utilizing thought much more than the strenuous or repetitive use of their arms and legs. Others, such as factory workers, field hands and garment stitchers employ repetition and often the exhausting use of their muscles, much more than creative or challenging thought processes. And others, such as construction engineers and professional athletes, must actively combine large muscle activity with highly engaged thought in order to successfully and safely accomplish a particular task.
Of course, there’s everything in between. At the end of the day, some will say it all boils down to working “smart”, or not.
And that is a steaming pile of horse pucky.
I say that because what is usually meant when someone says they, or someone else, worked “smart”, is that a lot of money was made, which means, naturally, they worked smart, unlike the guy or gal who, working not-smart, didn’t make a load of dough. C’mon folks, there’s only so much “smart” one can toss at picking cabbages. And clearly the argument will continue with, “Well, the smart cabbage picker will save his money, buy a truck and charge other cabbage pickers to ride to the fields, and thereby pay for the truck.” Which escalates to, “The smarter cabbage picker will buy a van and haul a lot of other cabbage pickers to a lot of fields.” And eventually, “The really smart cabbage picker will buy the goddamn field.”
Okay, I get it. But here’s what can happen, from the annals of reality.
Long ago in a place called . . . oh, I don’t know . . . let’s say . . . Oregon . . . trees were discovered growing all over the place. A smart guy with an ax came along and started chopping down some trees here and there, then hauled the trees to the mill and sold the milled lumber to people who wanted to build houses and stuff. Before long, an even smarter guy with a chain saw came along and did the same thing, only a lot faster and more efficiently. Well, sure enough, along comes a really, really smart guy with a box full of chain saws and bulldozers and trucks and all sorts of stuff. This guy tears down every single thing on the hillside — because it’s much easier and cheaper (smarter) to chop down every last tree if you get rid of everything in the way — and then he hauls his trees to the mill and blah, blah, blah.
Smart. Made a wagonload of money. But in return, the last guy clearcut the forest, which means he ripped out, tore up or ground to pieces every single thing on the hillside that got in his way, and left a foliage scar that will take decades to renew. (Yes, eventually people forced greedy folks like him to replant little trees to make up for all the mess he made. Big deal. It still takes three or four decades for that scar to heal, and even at that, other big parcels of trees nearby get whacked down so the landscape starts looking like a big checkerboard.)
Yes, a lot of money gets made that way, and some people think that’s smart, because whatever makes the most money is obviously the smartest thing to do.
Right.
Which makes me think of Bain Capital and people like Mitt Romney. (I wanted to put a face on all this. The choice was between Lloyd Blankfein, Bernie Madoff or Mitt. I went with the prettiest.) These are the guys who work really smart, obviously, because they make so very much money doing things that — truth be told — lurk just barely within legal limits, and ignore moral or ethical limits as if they don’t exist. (Maybe they don’t. If you saw my bank account, you’d know I obviously don’t work smart, thus I can’t possibly know if those limits truly exist or not.) Anyway, these guys are the clearcutters in the finance world. They’re the ones who carry the really sharp chain saws. Smart. You know, them that’s got. Who get more. And more. And more.
And that makes me think about our Village; how the gap between the über-rich and everybody else is growing so fast and so enormous. We — the Village — have been here before. More than once. We keep returning to this sick notion that some among them that’s got deserve all there is to get because they work smarter than all the rest of us, combined. Hey, if they got SOME by working a little bit smart, they deserve to have it ALL if they work smarter than everybody else. That’s how the world goes ’round, right?
Them that’s got, shall get . . .
Reality’s history demonstrates, every generation has them that’s got, and every generation also has them that’s not. Even Jesus said, “The poor you will always have with you . . . “, and those among his followers who remembered their catechism understood He was referencing a passage in Deuteronomy:
For there will never cease to be poor in the land . . .
In other words, because human nature is what it is, we, the Village, will never, ever do the things necessary — the things that are within our reach — to undo the insufficiencies that oppress the poor among us, which is far more than a damnable shame. And not just for the poor. It’s a damnable shame for the Village. For oh, so many reasons.
Them that’s not, shall lose . . .
