Have you ever sat in an airport listening to the boarding calls and wondered why you aren’t a “preferred” flyer.  And if you are not “preferred, what exactly are you?  Those first class customers even get a separate strip of carpet to walk down in insulated glory to the jet bridge.  I don’t resent the children, families, disabled, and even service members going down the path of glory on their way to Cleveland, but what about the underpaid teachers who teach your children, or the exhausted mental health workers barely covering living expenses, or that dental assistant who drained the checking account to visit an ill parent? We sit compliantly waiting for the cattle call.

Now just about every service you run into has a premium or platinum level of service, which is often the only level you can get without being harassed to distraction by commercials or AI generated schemes that insist you could be as good as those premium customers. This premium stratification of services for sale is the set of training wheels in this intensely competitive, economy obsessed society to prepare the vast majority of working and retired Americans to accept the fate of the working middle class moving to a second world existence. Our new economy has a million subtle ways to curate the stratified presence of wealth (cash) as the American version of equality.

The flaunting of wealth by the current administration is going to help move this cancerous stratification of class into pure corruption. The childish glee they take in big buildings, gilded gold, overly expensive shoes and dress belongs and should stay with the eighth grade middle school stretch of the highway to maturity. We need to take a second look at how pathetic the incentives for compliance really are.  The market for the “bling”  and “merch” is booming.  If we are not wealthy for $10.95 we can look wealthy from a distance with blurred eyes.  If something is missing in your life it just might be the dignity of self acceptance and the power to insist on equality as it really is.  Dignified equality, like elections, is not for sale because it has no price tag.

Modest Proposal for Good

Perhaps a good first step is to realize there is no first step to dignity.  We all don’t deserve anything other than the recognition and respect of our own humanity.  Rather than mounting the ladder up to nowhere perhaps we should just say every human including myself deserves to be treated with fairness, justice and an equal shot fulfilling Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs. Once you understand that you will find yourself looking at the clownish show of “first class”, “premium”, and “platinum” services in baffled bemusement instead of health threatening resentment.  More importantly at the polls you will vote for humanity rather than wealth.  That would be good. Keep in mind the rest used to be called the “rat race.”