We Rail Against Rampant Inequality

We all know what crushing financial and social inequality looks like. But let's pause for a minute and ask ourselves what true, across-the-board equality would look like.

You know. Everyone having the same stuff, the same amount of stuff, no one richer or poorer than anyone else.

The image above is one example. Does equality in housing look like what the good people of Pleasant View in Missoula, Montana, USA, have or is it more along the lines of what the equally good people of Smižany, Slovakia call home?

The USSR, (member them?) wasn’t the first to attempt to level the playing field but they certainly did it on a scale never before seen. Hundreds of millions of homes across the eleven times zones of the Soviet bloc were demolished, vast fields of newly designed apartment housing sprang up and an entire generation of people was forcibly moved into these sprawling apartment blocks because…equality.

Our version in this country after The Good War was Levittown and its ilk. But ours was less about ensuring equality in housing — witness the exclusion of Black Americans — than quickly building a lot of relatively inexpensive housing for all those (white) soldiers streaming back who were ready to claim The American Dream: owning their own homes.

It’s worth remembering, however, that the Soviet tsunami of re-housing that many people didn’t spring out of a hole in the ground.

That was just one of the results of their own round of crippling economic inequality. When the poor are so poor that they can’t eat and the rich are so rich they can’t spend all that money, something’s gotta give. In Russia, in 1917, it was the ruling class.

What it will be here remains to be seen.

Given that the root problem here is a lack of fair distribution of resources — and that’s driven by our old friend, greed — the solution would seem relatively straightforward.

Redistribute the wealth.

However, as any good Soviet apparatchik will tell you, ain’t no fixing greed. Even in the glory days of full, ahem, Soviet Socialist Equality, some comrades were more equal than others. There will always be those among us who are determined to grab all the cookies they can. It’s also true that many of these cookie monsters are singing the praises of equality while they’re stuffing their pockets and offshore investment accounts.

And surprise, surprise, surprise! It’s usually these same fellas — because the Margaret Thatchers of this world are still the outliers — with their cheeks bulging who have taken it upon themselves to “govern” the rest of us.

Again, there’s the problem staring us in the face: too few people on this planet have hogged too much of the good stuff leaving too little for the rest of us.

In spite of the best efforts of revolutionaries throughout history, the rich keep raking it in while the poor squabble among ourselves. It’s worth noting that after almost every successful revolution, it’s the guys writing the pamphlets and egging the fanatics on who ultimately manage to enrich themselves once they are the ones pulling the levers.

Do I look like I’m pulling any levers here?

I got no solution to the conundrum of human greed. It seems to be an evolutionary development geared towards survival in a brutal world of grab or die. Interestingly, it doesn’t seem to have registered that those high adrenalin days of grab or die have, well, died. Newsflash, investors: there’s enough of everything now — and has been for several centuries —so howzabout we pretend to be well-behaved kindergartners who know how to share.

But we won’t.

Still, let’s all put on our round John Lennon, rose-tinted glasses and play another game that the five-year-olds rock: Imagine.

Maybe you’re better at this game than I am, but I’ve got a pretty lively imagination perking away in here and I still can’t visualize what a completely egalitarian society would look like. How would it operate? On the honor system? That’s rich. Remember we’re talking about homo sapiens here, the ones who hopped down from trees, popped up on their hind legs, and set about decimating an entire planet (talk about your invasive species!).

Look, we already know it’s ticky tacky to live in houses that look like all the other houses. Uncle Pete told us so.

How can any of us be outstanding individuals with style and panache and radically expressive ways of dressing without creating some sense of inequality in the room? How can every one of us stand out from the crowd if everyone else in the crowd is vying for the spotlight? In our deepest, most private backrooms do we really want everyone to be equal? Maybe I can be just a teensy bit more on top of my game than the other schmucks on my street. Is that so bad?

No, Cupcake, not only is complete equality impossible…we don’t want it. Not really.

What we want is to have enough for ourselves and those around us so they’ll quit asking us for money on the subway. What we want is for those preening kazillionaires to shoot themselves off to Mars in their branded rocketships and not come back. We agitate for social and economic justice without the first notion of what that would A) entail us to do and give up and B) actually even look like.

You mean I might have a Black woman boss who doesn’t think my jokes are funny and expects me to actually get to work on time.

None of this is to say we stop agitating.

It’s crucial for our cratering sense of shared human experience that we march and shout and carry hand-made signs with dumb puns and wear silly hats and phone bank and pass out flyers and do the crappy stuff no one wants to do and do it for no pay. It doesn’t even matter if we succeed especially since none of us are all that sure what success will be in this struggle.

Here’s a thought: Just by locking arms and moving forward with courage and determination, we succeed.

Got plans for Saturday?

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