4/8/25

Post by Joshua Rubin

I sometimes wonder, in the midst of the barrage of horrors that are fired at us each new day, whether we ought to be quite as shocked as we are. I wonder, if we had been paying attention, we might have noticed that we have spent our lives on this same road. That we have just gotten further along it. As outspoken as I have tried to be, I have been complacent in my own way.

I have accepted and enjoyed the privileges of my skin color and citizenship in a nation that has long propped up the middle class, of which I am a card-carrying member by virtue of my station, while blithely accepting the pockets of poverty that my class depends on. Not just far away, in the so-called Third World, but in my city, in my own nation. Not that I didn’t know it was unjust. I knew. But, as I am human and like the rest of my species, deeply flawed, I found myself able to enjoy the fruits of wealth extraction, not by any means at the top of the inequality pyramid, but comfortably in the middle.

I expressed chagrin and tried to speak out and support policies that might have mitigated this unjust social configuration. But I enjoyed its fruits nonetheless. And honestly, I could have remained contented enough if it weren’t for the strange fact that those who were drivers of the inequality (and not just passengers like me) seem never to be content with their share, to an extreme that is apparent to all watching these days. There are men who have so much more than they could ever enjoy, and they still want more, perhaps, it has been suggested, trying to fill a kind of emptiness we all recognize as humans, but that some of us know can never be filled.

And this latest impossible frenzy of greed and power-mongering has done what we could have known was down this road. It has turned back on us, and we are now being taught a lesson in runaway capitalism: no one is safe from its brutality. Oh, it hasn’t quite reached me yet, though my cushioned retirement is getting considerably less upholstered as the robber barons find ways to extract their booty. But it gets closer.

Those who know me know that I pay particular attention to people who leave their homes and migrate for a better life. Migration was not long in the past in my family, who fled pogroms. Others, who waited another generation to flee ended their journeys in camps like the ones being built now, in new pockets of misery in every part of this nation that I am forced to admit is mine.

This is my road. The scenery has been changing, but the destination was far from unknowable.