Written by Marianne Mansfield, cartoon by Clay Jones
I’ve never been wealthy. Nor have I ever been poor. If I had to peg my childhood status I’d say we lived slightly below the middle of the middle class. When my sister and I were growing up, there were years when Santa Claus’s deliveries were a bit sparse, but other than that we didn’t really give much thought to how we compared to other children. Today I shudder to admit that my attention was so riveted on the materiel of Christmas, but a bit of pride sneaks in, too. My parents made it pretty painless to be a part of our family.
In college there were days I scoured the linings of coat pockets to scrape together enough change to buy a pack of smokes, but again, that wasn’t a character-defining moment. All of my chums had those episodes when spending money ran thin.
So, you might ask, why do I spend the time here establishing my credentials as neither poor nor wealthy. Because…
I find myself struggling to wrap my head around the amount of money that makes this world of ours go round, and not necessarily in a good way.
Case in point: The Koch brothers. The announcement of their intent to pour $900 million dollars into the 2016 presidential election, beginning with the selection of the candidates themselves, makes my blood run cold. For sake of comparison, let’s take a look at the numbers for the 2012 election cycle. The Republican National Committee, along with their Senate and House counterparts, spent $657 million dollars. Total. Their Democratic counterparts spent $647 million. Total.
While it is not my purpose to attempt to predict how this money will influence the selection of candidates for the Republican Party, that $900 million represents not only the buying of enormous influence in the politics of our country, it could also effectively overwhelm the voices of those of us who are not in the business of buying clout.
Another case in point: Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Justice Ginsburg recently gave Irin Cameron, a reporter for MSNBC, a rare and wide ranging interview in which she predicted that it would be unlikely that the Court would overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision legalizing abortion.
Rather, Ginsburg foresees the issue of access to abortions becoming a matter of money. Those women who can travel, and who can afford to pay the price will never lose their ability to secure an abortion. The restrictions that are now cropping up in the states (building codes, wait times, limits on insurances) according to Ginsburg in an article in the Huffington Post, will effectively endanger the ability of poor women to the same service. In this scenario, it is the lack of money that could make the world stop spinning for poor women.
Perhaps my problem is that I’ve never had so much money that I could imagine throwing it in the direction of a world order I came up with. Nor have I ever had so little money that I’ve had to fore go a life-altering decision because I couldn’t afford it. It is sad to say, but I guess I am guilty of taking what I have for granted.
It gives me no consolation moreover, to acknowledge that I am behaving like the majority of Americans. We hear the pundits railing against the Koch brothers, but what’s missing is a widespread and deafening public outcry about their throwing their weight around. Are we quiet because we feel they know more than we do? Or are we quiet because we feel helpless to challenge their sway? Can they truly buy whatever they want? I for one, am certainly unwilling to cede my right to participate in the democratic process to those guys, no matter how much money they hurl at the upcoming elections.
It isn’t simply that their $900 million dollar gorilla sits on the opposite side of the political aisle from me. It’s more than that. One person, one vote is more than just a slogan to me. It means that my voice needs to carry an impact approximately equal in import to the fellas next to me. It’s the equal protection clause of the US Constitution that the Koch boys are subverting, and we need to speak out.
And while we are speaking out, let us not forget that it isn’t only the overabundance of hard cold cash that can upset the apple cart of fairness. It is also the absence of financial means that can send the scales held by the blindfolded Lady Justice lurching in the wind.
The examples of how poverty narrows and restricts the lives of those who live in it are more obvious, I suppose, but the root is the same.
It is money.
There’s more to life, isn’t there? There is justice. There is compassion and there is the sense of life’s true balance we experience when a thing, in its most simple essence, is fair.
Money just can’t buy that.
Marianne Mansfield has lived in Southern Utah since 2010. She and her husband followed their grandchildren to this area from Michigan. In her former life she was a public school educator. More than half of her career was spent as an elementary principal, which is why her response to most challenges is, “This isn’t my first rodeo.” She grew up in Indiana, and attended Miami of Ohio, Ball State University and Michigan State. She is a loyal MSU Spartan and Detroit Tiger baseball fan. She has been writing fiction and opinion since her retirement in 2004.
