Easy Money

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it."

The Gospel of John

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Dear Kate,

You said yesterday's piece was difficult, which doesn't surprise me.  But would it surprise you if I am to say it was difficult to you because it should be the easiest?

Easy as blindness to a frog who's been living at the bottom of her well all her life, knowing only darkness and thus no contradistinction called "light."  Easy as a jump she could have made a long time ago but wouldn't know the option was there either.

How can it be hard for you to understand your own language recast by me when I said "whichever way a person leans politically the assumption is there, consciously or--even more dangerously so--unconsciously, that democracy and constitutionalism are to various degrees built on economic development and distributive justice"?

Maybe I will recast it yet again, in another set of your language, religious (and ultimately political), that a human being's redemption is first and last an economic one.  Now does it make more sense?

If you need to die now I am sure you can die happily.  You have enough for your funeral, and have had enough for your feasts.  But somehow the mission is not accomplished yet, you think, that you are not there yet.  Where?  Where are you trying to go?  To what end are you trying to live?  Now don't bullshit me like a politician does, giving me platitude about the value and even sanctity of life without substantiating any of your catchphrases and slogans, freedom and equality and justice and anti this or pro that.  You are not trying to win any vote here: you can afford to come clean.

You know you are working hard for your money and there's no other way but to keep working at it.  Once that part is settled maybe you can afford to care for more, but until then, nothing could come together in a cosmic way, stars could never align, nothing could declare your life justified as only your economic status could.  There's never too much, only not enough.  Which is to say you can never really afford to try any cup of tea that's not steeped in dollar bills of your preferred denomination.

And if one day you can allow yourself to grow senile and magnanimous, you might wish to invest in the life of others by justifying theirs the same way, fighting for their "rights" to live well like you do, well enough to answer to your conscience but not too much to hurt your pride, equal access to all as long as you are a bit above par, educated, moneyed, and powerful enough to define equality and distribute justice.

The irony of speaking the words above in a world of well-bottom frogs does not escape me.  Neither does the agony of the Man on the cross.

Yours, Alex