Riches and Real People

I don't want to be rich.

There. I said it. Even thinking that thought feels somehow blasphemous in this society where lotteries are commonplace and people's characters are often judged by their bank accounts: "to get a loan, you must first prove you don't need one".  But all I have ever wanted -- at least since I grew up -- is enough. I define "enough" as "sufficient to keep me connected, to let me hold up my end of multiple friendships, with something left over to fund occasional breaks from the world".

I don't play the lottery. To me it's a tax on the innumerate. If I did play, and won, I would give a great deal of my winnings away to people less fortunate than I am. But in all honesty I would dread the exercise. How do you decide at what proximity of relationship the money should be cut off? And how much goes to each person without making everyone else feel as if you shortchanged him or her? How many friends will stick by you after you "only" give them $$$$$ when they were hoping for $$$$$$$? The answer is always surprising, and heartbreaking.

I don't trust charities (with a very few exceptions): most of them seem to be in business to perpetuate themselves. You can't tell me, for example, that if we really put our minds to it we couldn't cure cancer. How many billions of dollars have been swallowed up by cancer? How much of it has had any effect? Likewise the disadvantaged both at home and abroad. If we could solve poverty by throwing money at it, Africa would be the richest continent on the planet and Canada's indigenous population would be living in the lap of luxury.

Canadian author Spider Robinson has, to my mind, the best, most positive idea for getting rid of a great deal of extraneous money quickly, legally and karmically. Go to a law school. Find someone who has just missed out on a scholarship. Offer to pay her way through school, plus living expenses, if she will, in return, promise you and your friends and family free legal representation as and if needed. Go to a trade school and repeat. And repeat. And repeat. Amass yourself a group of dedicated professionals in any field you and your loved ones might conceivably have need of for the foreseeable future.

That's something I would do. I would leave myself enough money so that Eva and I would never have to work again unless we chose to: but at our age that's not nearly as much money as you'd think, not when our tastes are as simple and inexpensive as they are.

The truth is I don't easily trust expensive tastes. It's hard enough to accept that the level of quality in products has declined such that you must pay out the nose for simple durability now. Let me give you an example.

My current bike.

It's (to my mind) quite expensive, but in reality it's firmly in the lower end of retail prices on bikes. It was one of the cheapest models available, if not THE cheapest,  at Ziggy's Bicycles in downtown Kitchener: a place I had heard good things about.

The bike came with leaky tubes. Both tires. I had three flats in less than three weeks. These flats, Eva and I were told in no uncertain terms, were my fault: I was supposed to check the air pressure every time I got on the bike.

C'mon. Seriously? I used to go three seasons a year never needing more than (maybe) a single top-up in my bicycle tires. I did that for about a quarter century. Now you're telling me that the merchandise you sold me wasn't in fact defective, that the tires on it are so persnickety that I have to baby the fucking things?

We took the bike where I should have gone in the first place: MacPhail's Cycle and Sports. Got the tires replaced, at considerable expense. They've needed air twice in a full year's riding.

The funny thing is, I detailed this story in a Reddit thread asking for a decent bike store in town. The condescension I got in response was incredible. "Ziggy's is for professionals, people who would never go to them to fix something so mundane as a leaky tube. MacPhail's is for amateurs, they're happy to sell you a BSO." (I had to look that up: Bike Shaped Object.)

It's not often I want to slap strangers, even on the internet. I wanted to dislocate this one's nose so he might be able to look way down here and see me.



The biggest reason I don't want to be rich is that I absolutely can't stand what comes, in so many cases, with excess money: pretension.

I abhor pretension more than anything else in this world, I think.
I despise people who believe they are better than me or anyone else simply because of an accident of birth. The very concept of 'royalty' in this day and age makes me ill. I'm willing to concede there are rich people who have worked hard for their money...but not many. Certainly not as many as say they did, which is pretty much all of them. The average minimum wage worker with a work ethic puts in something called "an honest day's labour." That adjective, "honest", is there for a reason. Can you honestly tell me that the CEO of the company, the man (it's usually a man) who makes Mrs. Peon's annual salary by noon on January 2--really works that much harder?

Even the people who have earned every cent and more of their wealth by my admittedly narrow standards--doctors, for instance--receive as their "just" reward admittance into something called "high society"...which is nothing more than an elaborate and ornate excuse to look down your nose at PSOs (people-shaped objects).. i.e., the rest of us.

Here, let's contrast snootery with pootery. Among my circle of friends, if someone lets forth with a gut-ripping fart that proceeds to put everyone in sharp mind of dead cattle, she'll like as not be met with horrified cheers. Transplant that fart into some elegant gathering and...well, Queen Elizabeth I's courtier, the Earl of Oxford, once freed a mud-duck mid-bow to his Sovereign and put himself in exile for seven years. (Upon returning, he was greeted with "my lord, I had forgot the Fart.")

Everybody farts, you know. Rich people, poor people...even the President farts. He farts oval farts. Because of his orifice.... How can something everybody does be shameful? I'll tell you how. If you pretend you don't fart, you're better than those second-class nobodies who do.

Does anybody really like caviar? Be honest, now. How much of the joy of eating caviar derives from the knowledge that most people can't afford to?
That's one pithy example in what, to me, appears to be an entire ecosystem heavily polluted by pretension. I wouldn't last fifteen minutes in it without choking. Give me comfort food in comfortable surroundings with comfortable people, people who are themselves around me and who allow me to be myself around them. People who don't feel the need to list off the credentials of every acquaintance they mention, every time they mention them. "My friend Robert, the director"..."my pal Sharon, who runs a small country in her spare time"...hell, I actually know somebody who will name-drop to the second degree, as if I'm supposed to be impressed he knows somebody rich and famous who knows somebody even richer and famouser. What is that about, anyway? What kind of fundamental insecurity does that speak to? Are you really so much improved by knowing rich people who know richer people? Am *I* improved by learning you know them?

I'm interested in people as people. I'm only interested in what they've done if it sheds a positive light on who they are. Amassing money, in and of itself, doesn't.  I don't give a tinker's damn what you do to pay your bills, much less what your husband or childhood friend or cousin does to pay the employee who pays their bills. This tends to restrict my choice of friends to people roughly at or below my station in life.

Real people, in other words. Not pretend ones.