Vesuvius Death

The median US family income is $48,250; in Nepal, it is $250. Owning a car, a house, having any savings and a job puts one into an incredibly small percentage of this world’s population. We in the USA protest and complain at being in the bottom 99% of the this country’s income. As wealth is increasingly concentrated into a smaller and smaller portion of our population, I find it difficult to disagree with these complaints—most of us are being pushed down the economic ladder, not climbing up it. But even our most impoverished are wealthy beyond measure compared to those living on the streets of Calcutta or in the slums of Sao Paolo. Recently, I watched a documentary on Pompeii, a city destroyed by volcanic action in 79 AD. In one underground room, a group of 52 people died from poison gas. Their bones are mute testimony to their last moments of life. Oddly, the group is divided into two groups, each against an opposing wall. Between the two groups is one lone man. His name was Crassus. With his signet ring and money box beside him, it appears that Lucius Crassus was the owner of the building and business. The building was a clearinghouse for goods coming into and out of the city. Wine, wheat and all manner of Roman necessities and luxuries flowed through this building. On one side of the death room, the bones were of the poor: the richest person clutched a small bag containing a few copper coins-perhaps the day’s receipts for a street vendor. On the other wall were skeletons of the wealthy. One woman, probably in her early twenties, her abdominal cavity containing the tiny skeleton of a full-term infant was surrounded by jewelry: rings, necklaces inset with emeralds and boxes of gold and precious artifacts. She and Lucias Cassius, have been dubbed the green man and the green woman from the stain that their jewelry left on their bones. This horrific image is not that dissimilar from today: We are increasingly divided into the haves and the have-nots. A few have, but most are barely eking out a day-to-day, hand-to-mouth existence. A shelter is a luxury; a car and unrealized and unrealizable dream; money in the bank, not even considered; medical and still more, life insurance never even heard of. Gated communities, armed guards and bullet-proof cars separate us one from another-each group on our opposing wall; with the very richest alone and alienated in a distinct limbo in between. Ronald Reagan’s fallacious “trickle-down” economics is coming home to roost. In our society, we complain, at the inequitable gulf, and rightly so. But we who are protesting need also to put the shoe on the other foot and consider those even further down the economic ranks. But rather than condemning those above, looking at my own heart, may I remember to open my wallet just a bit wider, give a bit more generously, let a bit more trickle down and nourish and sustain those who have such tiny resources. Dying with the stain of wealth on my bones is not my idea of a good death. May I die having shared so much that I die in poverty but well content with its true riches: that of a contented heart. 12-12-11