Where do I begin with this one?! There are so many current events, both at home and abroad, that I have no clue how to begin. Do I talk about the energy bill crisis? The general inequalities of our social-economic system? Shall I rant about the failures of our cruel and callous Conservative government? What of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine?
I think, for this entry, I might draw inspiration from the issue of inequality of wealth. I have written of this before. We live in a society that’s pretty wasteful, and I am not innocent of being a participant in that. Nearly all of us living within western society (and not just western) end up being part of a system that rewards greed. We all want the latest phone/TV/games console, and we all want nice clothes, shoes, and other symbols of luxury. We have allowed ourselves to be convinced that this is the best form of society, by the people who milk it the most. Jeff Bezos, the Executive Chairman of Amazon, has a net worth of $114.5 billion dollars, as of November 2022. The median salary of Amazon workers in 2020 was just over $29,000 per year. It would take someone earning that wage 5,000 years to make $145 million, or 0.13% of Bezos’ current worth.
Allow that to sink in. Five thousand years. There is no way that Bezos needs that much money. He could (along with the other billionaires of the world) do so much to address problems like poverty, hunger, and homelessness, whilst remaining comfortably rich, but both he, and governments that prop up these problems (such as the UK Tories) benefit from the status quo. If there’s no profit in housing people, there’s no interest in tackling the problem. Selfishness and greed are tremendous problems, and they lean into so many other issues. Climate change is quite possibly the most pressing concern of our time, and solutions – or at least the start of them – exist, but the people who get rich out of the status quo will not go for them. The survival of the species is less important than making money…
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