Money can’t buy an election.  Money is a first class motivator, but it has short arms and clumsy fingers. You can try to irrigate an electorate from on high with tens of millions of dollars, but it falls to earth like a New Mexico rain beard evaporating nearly completely in the space between the source and earth itself.  The motivation of money comes from that money’s close relationship to your wallet and today’s needs.  The short arms of Mr. Trillionaire’s political donations never got beyond the comfortable heat of the partisan PAC itself.  As he learned, along with the President, Americans are hungry for their community, their pride and their life style.  Those needs never shook hands with the clumsy fingers of the wasteful efforts of an obscenely wealthy man.  Imagine what that impulsively wasted one half billion dollars (this man’s pocket change) could do for children and adults with disabilities, the hungry, the medically needy, and impoverished school districts.  To use an old, likely Irish, turn of phrase that many of you can probably relate to:  “Jesus wept”.

A Modest Proposal for Finding Good

For a brief moment set aside lthe legal,ethics, and morality arguments.   The financial capacity of one person to be able to carelessly spread cash over a needy land like so much excess rain water to achieve only self centered goals seems a spiritual abomination.  Yet, with the laws of this land, it is perfectly natural and just for the wealthy to cloud the reality of human need and aspiration with their excess cash.  Dark money darkens the land. Reality is a consensus expression of all the people and a democratic government is the means by which the experience of all the people, rich, middle, and poor, finds expression into that consensus.  If wealthy people want to reserve their wealth for their own personal needs and desires, in this country, that is a right.  But to find good here we must ask ourselves: May very wealthy individuals use the power of their wealth to cloud the understanding and expressions of the needs of the vulnerable and working people who shore up the economy of this country?  Answer that question and you might have found good.