Someone broke into Alex Rodriguez’s rental car on Sunday and stole his stuff.
Stuff, if that’s the right word for $500,000 in property.
Think about that for a moment, Rodriguez, one of the finest baseball players of his era, and now an ESPN sportscaster, had half-a-million dollars of stuff in his rental car, parked a few blocks from the San Francisco Giants’ stadium, where he was working the game that night.
Half-a-million dollars! In a rental car!
According to the cops the “stuff” was a camera, a laptop computer, miscellaneous jewelry and a bag.
OK, cameras and laptops get stolen all of the time. What’s that add up to? Maybe $3,000? So I’d say the jewelry was a little more than “miscellaneous.”
Or else… what the hell was in that bag?
I don’t begrudge Rodriguez for being fabulously rich. I don’t judge him for how he spends his money. I’ll just use him as an example of the spectacular economic gulf that separates Americans.
If I considered all of the stuff that I’ve owned over the course of my life, I don’t think it would add up to half-a-million dollars. That would include my house, a handful of modest vehicles, electronics, lawnmowers, dogs, books, music, shot glasses, clothing, artwork, furniture, cleaning products, two lava lamps…
And all of that stuff, of course, wouldn’t fit in my car.
Some people don’t have much stuff. I hear complaints about poor people, American citizens and immigrants alike, receiving public assistance. The argument goes: Why should Americans spend their working life contributing to pensions and social security, while others receive a handout?
Non-partisan studies have shown that Trump’s tax cuts benefited only the top 1 percent of Americans. The rich. Who continue to maneuver for more. At some point, the pursuit of riches goes beyond what anyone needs. It becomes about greed and ego. The playing field is not level. Ninety-nine percent of Americans are thrashing away in a gulley, while the 1 percent stand at the top of the mountain, laughing and rolling boulders down onto the rest of us.
I spent more than two decades on public transportation, riding the bus to downtown Rochester for work, and home again later that evening. From the bus windows, I could see us pass through nice neighborhoods of elegant old homes, and rough-hewn blocks of closed storefronts and people sitting on weary porches, watching the world pass them by. I always sat in the back of the bus, listening to the conversations of my fellow riders. They would be on their phones, talking to their parole officer. I’d watch them filling out applications for low-wage jobs at Burger King.
But I’d also hear them talking about their kids, worrying about their kids’ schools, the future. Worrying about falling behind on the rent. Or not having a car so they can find a better job, one beyond this bus route.
Working alongside the school-to-prison pipeline is a poverty pipeline. There’s no shut-off valve for either.
Most Americans live paycheck to paycheck. Building savings and retirement plans are out of the question. Our economic system is not built to evenly distribute opportunity. In the land of opportunity, only the sharks eat well.
This weekend, Ken Cuccinelli, the Trump administration’s acting head of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, re-wrote the poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty. You likely learned the original words when you were in elementary school. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” When pressed on that longstanding American ideal, Cuccinelli added a codicil. “Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet.”
In other words, people fleeing poverty, crime and political oppression is no longer good enough for entry into our country. Compassion is dead. You must demonstrate you are not a burden on those of us whose immigrant parents got here first.
I suppose slaves brought here from Africa were not a burden, because they handled much of the labor that built this country. Without pay. The Chinese people who were encouraged to move here were not a burden, because for virtually no pay they helped chip away with pick and shovel, and blast through the mountain passes, the path that became the Trans-Continental Railroad. We brought Nazi scientists here after World War II to help build our space program.
So historically, our immigration policies have not been above reproach.
Reliable economists – not the Fox News theorists who have Trump’s ear – tell us that immigrants are not a burden, that they add to our economy. American businesses – like Trump’s resorts and golf courses – happily hire them, because they’ll work hard for the kind of wages that no one could raise a family on, let alone load the car with half a million dollars in cameras and jewelry.
Immigrants pay taxes, something we’re not sure Trump does.
Those immigrants that the Trump administration tells us to fear would represent just a small sliver of the Third-World America that many of us keep at arm’s length. They’re coming here in search of a better life, even if it’s simply a job picking fruit. How can they be a threat to us?
The 1 percent are reinforcing the walls surrounding what increasingly looks like an authoritarian, white, ruling nationalist class.
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