Those Less Fortunate

This is a phrase that I see a lot: "those less fortunate." I read about it in news articles; I hear about it from JV’s talking about their clients; I see it on virtually every cover letter for someone who wants to intern at our office; when people congratulate me for “taking a year off” (see older post on that whole idea). I think that phrase has, like many things, lost the original depth and nuance of its meaning and become a shallow, bland placeholder phrase. When people say “those less fortunate,” it can refer to any number of groups and situations, but it primarily means people that have less money, less education, less privilege due to their race and class. Some people that make it a point to sound progressive also include things like gender, sexual orientation, and ability in that list, but primarily people talking about the less fortunate mean the former list much more than the latter. I think the following applies with equal force to any of them.

When we use the label “less fortunate” to refer to the social position and struggles of these groups of people, what we’re really doing is admitting that our privileged position over them is not the result of something we’ve done or earned, but it is primarily because we had better luck than them. We are fortunate. We’re the lucky ones, as Allison Krauss might say. We have what we have not just because we deserve it, but because somewhere along the line we drew straws, great big humongous cosmically relevant straws, and some people got the short ones, but we were not those people. Some of us got the awesome wide ones you can get at Burger King, the ones that are so big you can actually drink a milkshake through them without it folding because you had to suck too hard. Other people got bright, colorful Krazy Straws that glow in the dark and light up as you drink through them and maybe even change colors. And then “those less fortunate” got a coffee stirrer that has been chewed on by a cat a few years ago so it’s all twisted up and liquid won't travel through it. As one might guess, the coffee stirrer is the shortest of the available straws in this situation, and the guy or girl who picked it got totally screwed. And it’s not their fault they ended up with the bad straw, that’s just it – they’re less fortunate. They don’t deserve the short straw any more than I deserve the Burger King straw, or the Olsen twins deserve the Krazy Straw. But that’s the straw they got, and they’re stuck with it.

But this is the other thing about “the less fortunate”: just because the difference between my situation and theirs is based on luck, that doesn’t mean that it’s completely out random. The straws didn’t all appear out of thin air, nor did they group themselves together and organize the picking of themselves. It’s true that neither coffee stirrer girl nor Krazy Straw guy did anything to deserve the straw they randomly picked-- but at some point SOMEONE was putting all the straws together, and they put the Krazy Straw and the Burger King straw and the coffee stirrer all in the same handful, knowing full-well that someone was going to get each of them and that would affect their life. Or at least their straw-related happiness.

So here I am with a pretty good straw. I can consider myself fortunate. I see other people with pretty crappy straws. They can consider themselves less fortunate. In the same way that I didn’t do anything to make myself fortunate, and they didn’t do anything to make themselves less fortunate, I didn’t do anything to make them less fortunate either. I’m not the guy that put all the straws together, I just benefit from it. This is a very difficult situation for me to wrap my head around and to figure out what is really right. I, like most people, feel like I worked hard for the things that I have. I started with a good straw, but I also had to take what I had and make something out of it. It’s not like everything just worked out for me automatically just because I had a pretty good straw, right? I know people that had straws as good as mine that didn’t work as hard as me, and many of them aren’t in as good of a position. But then again, if I look at the people with the really good straws, the ones way better than even mine, I notice that many of the ones that didn’t work as hard as I did are still better off than me, and the ones that tried as hard or harder than me ended up WAY better off. As egocentric as I am, even I can extrapolate that experience to presume the way the people with the coffee stirrer feel when comparing their lives to mine.

So what’s the take-away here? First of all, I think it’s important to remember that I am, and most of the people reading this are, extremely fortunate. We have more, in terms of most measures of social capital, than the average person in this country, let alone the world. Second, that our position is based largely on just that – good fortune. And for many of the people that are missing out, it’s not their fault that they drew the short straw; they’re just unlucky.

Here’s one crazy idea, just to throw out something both concrete and controversial. In the grand scheme of things, it’s not that radical, but just think for a minute about the possibilities. What if there were a 90% estate tax? And all the proceeds were divvied out across the country, were earmarked solely for public education, and were allocated in proportion to the number of students at each school? If you really want to start eliminating luck from the equation, you have to simultaneously get rid of the advantages that come from inheriting wealth, and the (separate but related) disadvantages that come with inheriting poverty. Because you inherit poverty just as much as you inherit wealth. And in many ways, it’s easier to squander your wealth than it is to overcome your poverty. Of course it’s not a solution, but wouldn’t it be an interesting start?

What I think is especially appealing to me about this plan is that you’re not taking away anything that someone EARNED, except the person who died, and I don’t think that person has much of a legitimate claim to it once they’re dead. I’m not sure people have the right to inherit wealth. If there is an argument along those lines that I’d be receptive to, I think it would be more that a person has the right to leave their money to whom they want, but even that I think is inaccurate. If you want people to have things you have, you should give it to them while you’re living. Once you’re gone, you don’t really have a claim to it anymore. That’s my current position, anyways. Which isn’t quite socialism, because you could still have as much wealth as you could personally acquire. You just wouldn’t get to start with so much that the rest of the players can’t compete. And competition, as we all know, is the heart of Capitalism, our national religion.