When I was young and just beginning to wrestle with such concepts, I remember literally giving myself a headache trying to wrap my little pea brain around the concept of eternity. “It’s a long time, so think of the longest time period you can think of and then know it is even longer than that, in fact it just keeps going on and on…” The internal monologue went something like that. Anyway, I’ve found most concepts to be a little easier to grasp than that—probably simply because I’m older (and wiser?) (well, older anyway).
Today, though, I read an article that gave me pause because of its scale—not in a spiritual way, but in a the-implications-are-so-big and the-inequality-is-so-great kind of way. The columnist from Yahoo! Finance (yes, I read it even when I’m not working) is Ben Stein (yes, of Win Ben Stein’s Money and Ferris Bueller fame) and much of the article didn’t stick with me except for the section entitled “Disparity by the Numbers” section, excerpted in part below:
The top one-tenth of 1 percent of earners in the nation earn about as much as the bottom 40 percent. That is, about 130,000 high-income Americans earn as much as the bottom 120 million Americans combined.
I always knew there was income inequality in the world, and that it wasn’t a first-world vs. third-world kind of thing. And I even knew that there were some really rich dudes. But the (emphasis added) portion really puts a fine point on it in my mind. That is a very few elites (the same elites who subscribe to the notion of the Wisdom of Crowds) exerting economic control over a whole lot of “crowd” (who very likely haven’t even heard of the book, let alone read it).
Anyway, the scale on both sides of that equation boggles my mind.
