Personal Reflections of a Middle-Aged Man

Reminder: 290 and 67. The 290 represents how many U.S. House of Representatives members it takes to override a presidential veto (all Representatives are up for reelection this year). It takes 67 U.S. Senators to override a presidential veto (35 Senators are up for reelection this year with 22 of those being Republicans—the ones we have to concentrate on the most). These numbers are very important this year at the ballot box because it will take this number of votes to help right this vast ship of a country for all of us, not just the billionaire class.

Last night a group of us went to see the local community theater musical production of Nine to Five. It was our first time attending since we moved into town, and for community theater, it was much better than expected. There are some strong voices in our small little hamlet.

As part of the production, Dolly Parton made a video appearance as a narrator of sorts. It may not have been the real thing, but you just can’t see or hear Dolly and not feel good. She just exudes and embodies feeling and doing good. On our way home after, I kept thinking about her and the good deeds she has done with her wealth and influence—she’s not a billionaire by any means and she isn’t stingy with her wealth.

Some of the things she has done has made large impacts for people. Her Imagination Library project—which has given away over 250 million books to children under the age of five, is the most well known. A lesser known may be her donation which helped to fund the creation of the Moderna Covid vaccine, helping to save millions of lives. Other less well-known projects and donations include the Buddy Program in which she paid students to buddy up to help one another make it to high school graduation along with college assistance for some, assisting families by giving them a total of around $10,000 over six months to help recover from a wildfire in Tennessee, along with assisting flooding victims in Tennessee’s Humphreys County, Hurricane Helene flood relief in East Tennessee, and a large donation to the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital. 

There are other women of note worth billions who have also been large donors or a large percentages of their vast fortunes to worthy projects—often with no strings attached, such as Melinda French Gates and MacKenzie Scott.

Contrast that to actual billionaires here in the United States, such as Elon Musk (net worth ≈$820 billion), Jeff Bezos (≈$241B), Larry Ellison (≈$276B), Mark Zuckerberg (≈$253B), or Peter Thiel (≈$23.9B). In fairness, each of these billionaires, and many others in the top 50 of U.S. billionaires have given large donations to various organizations. The difference is in comparison to their wealth, they give very little. And when they do give, the funds usually go through donor-advised funds, private institutions, or tightly controlled institutes. This usually means there are a lot of strings attached to the funds these entities receive. I might even guess that with these donations some of the strings might be any patents or copyrights go towards the donor, or maybe any breakthroughs, such as medical, the contributing benefactor receive some residuals from any money made from these breakthroughs. 

From my research, the actual billionaires haven’t built anything concrete for people to freely use. I also wasn’t able to find where any of these billionaire men helped anyone after a wildfire, flood or hurricane.

It is often stated we are living through a modern gilded age. I’m hard pressed to agree with this statement. In the original gilded age, there seemed to be an insatiable appetite for the rich to get richer, just like the billionaire of today. However, there is a major difference, rich folks in the original gilded age felt a responsibility for using their wealth for public works, projects from which we are still benefitting.

During the original gilded age, the billionaire class of that day, built things they, and the common folk, could use then and to this day. Some of those public works include Vanderbilt University, the New York Public Library, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Carnegie Libraries, the Brooklyn Bridge, the University of Chicago, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Chicago Art Institute, the San Francisco Ferry Building, the Washington National Cathedral, Central Park, among many others. 

One would be hard-pressed to find anything even remotely similar by today’s billionaire class. They seem to take anything and everything they can from the public as a whole, but give little to nothing in return to the public to use without cost. No parks, no universities, no libraries, no low-income housing, no rural hospitals, no food desert grocery stores, nothing that meets the needs of our time. They only seem consumed with being the richest person of all time in the history of the world by hoarding those billions of dollars while using what can be termed the commons, such as roads and other infrastructure, fire and police, while doing everything they can to not pay taxes, to pay their fair share.

What they do want to build are an ever increasing data mining structure, ever larger data centers using cities and towns common water sources and the electricity of the populace, and surveillance apparatus to spy on the common people of the world. They also seem to be perfectly fine bending the knee to someone intent on being an authoritarian leader.

What a legacy to leave.

They won’t be remembered for what they left like the Rockefeller’s, Carnegies, Vanderbilt’s, or Kennedy’s of the world, or for being people of principle. They will be remembered for what they wrought on us, rarely, so far, leaving us for the better.

So in a world of Musk’s, Bezo’s, Thiel’s, and Zuckerberg’s, be a Dolly.