Respectable Grown-Ups

When I am grown to man's estate
I shall be very proud and great,
And tell the other girls and boys
Not to meddle with my toys.  
- from Robert L. Stevenson's “A Child's Garden of Verses”

Robert Louis Stevenson

You may well have trouble believing this, but I saw it happen right before my eyes after midnight on a cold, snowy January night in the relatively wealthy, respectable town of Concord, Massachusetts.

This short street on which I lived was a cul-de-sac and I am looking out my window at these magnificent big snow flakes coming down under the streetlight and I see my two neighbors out in the middle of the turnaround, arguing with each other. Both are multi-millionaires. One of them is the 65-year old wife of the founder of a giant electronics company. The other is a recently-retired president of a large bank in Boston.

The lady has a wheelbarrow and has been shovelling snow into the wheelbarrow and carrying it across the street from her property and dumping it onto the bank president's property. You see, it isn't fair that the snowplow pushes all the snow down the street onto her property, but doesn't push much snow onto the bank president's property when it turns around. It isn't fair that they push more snow onto her property than his.

The bank president comes out to put a stop to this, but the electronics executive's wife knows that she has been wronged and is not going to accept it and let him get away with it.

Now, I've often thought about that incident in the fifty years since it happened, and it has served as a relatively clear example to me of how wealthy, “successful,” respected people who are favored beyond 99% of the people who have ever lived on earth or will ever live on earth, can feel such contempt and hatred for the rest of us: it's about the fact that they themselves never grew up, never broke through to what is truly important. How quick they are to accuse us of feeling like victims and of being childish and having a sense of grievance – for they are talking about themselves. Those two wealthy, “successful” people out in the snow after midnight fighting about the snowplow's unfairness could have been five years old, or even younger, in real terms.

A friend tells me that Alcoholics Anonymous says that you have to resume your development by going back, as it were, to the age at which you started drinking. These people imbibed the money and respectability and “success” poison early, and needed to go way, way back to when they were five years old and admit that they had not only been wrong and wasted their lives, but admit to the contempt and harm they inflicted upon the rest of us who saw through all that. Impossible.

I can still see them out there in the cold and storm, late at night, arguing over a wheelbarrow full of snow.