Americans like to believe that the people who get rich do so because they have better ideas, more energy and an ability to work harder than other people. So, the wealth they accumulate is a sign of their success and presumably well deserved.
That's not, however, the general pattern. More often than not, the accumulation of wealth is the result of pinched pennies--pennies not spent on an extra gasket on a car engine; pennies not spent on an extra bolt to make sure a gas tank doesn't fall off and explode; pennies withheld from the paychecks of people who work over-time to complete a task almost every day. Sometimes the pennies are skimmed from accounts by ?bank errors? or mis-programmed scanners, harder to detect but much more efficient in generating an unearned profit.
Skimming is an old story. When I was a very little girl in Los Angeles, living in what would now be referred to as a neighborhood ?in transition?--i.e. more and more minorities, including immigrants, were moving in--the neighborhood was serviced by a number of small general and specialty stores, manned by their eagle-eyed proprietors. They were watching the pennies. Or rather, they were making sure that, regardless of the price they had posted on the shelves, they would add just a little extra when they rang it up. To a little kid who'd just mastered her addition and multiplication skills, this habit of theirs was really annoying. But, pointing out the error did get it corrected.
For almost twenty years, I lived with the memory of being humiliated by these shop-keepers, who obviously thought a little kid wouldn't notice what they were up to and didn't seem to care, since they pulled the same scam day after day. Then, as a matron of thirty, I happened to visit a neighborhood grocery in Harlem and, lo and behold, the checker of the express line, which I had been invited to ?cut? with my one item,
added a couple of cents more than the tag on the ice cream cooler had shown.
So, of course, I pointed out the ?mistake? and, while a chuckle spread through the line behind me, received the ?explanation? that the price he'd rung up was the price that ?should? have been on the tag. I didn't ?buy? as a matron what I didn't put up with as a kid. But I did suddenly realize that this pattern of behavior didn't have anything to do with me as a person. It was an established pattern that grew out of the belief (almost a point of ?honor?) that certain populations not only didn't ?deserve? to be dealt with fairly, but deserved to be cheated just to show them their proper place at the bottom of the social scale.
Now, when I read of the persistent pattern of ?stealing? the votes of minorities by engineering a huge discard pile or ?spoilage? (sometimes as much as 25% of the turnout), it doesn't look a lot different from the other kind of ?skimming? that makes some people rich at someone else's expense. Then blaming their lack of representation on this recalculated ?low voter turnout? is just another layer of humiliation, adding insult to injury.
Unfortunately, it doesn't do much good for the victims to speak up in a vacuum
against behavior that has persisted for decades. Witnesses are needed. And a champion. Somebody to step forward and call a halt to what seems to have escalated from skimming a few pennies or extra votes for a candidate or two, to a system of wholesale fraud that has resulted in the theft of our national election at least once, quite probably twice.
Is John Kerry that champion? Only time will tell.
Posted by Hannah at November 28, 2004 03:42 PM