The Dictator of Fairness

What is fair is a very subjective thing. It means different things to different people and it’s relative to all sorts of circumstances or situations. Unless you have a king or a dictator, what’s fair is rarely decided by a single individual. That’s why we have laws. Still some people think certain laws are unfair, and that’s why we have lawyers, arbitrators, judges, and juries. They help us interpret the law and decide what is fair. Those of us, who have been around for some time, have come to realize that this world is not always fair. We have wars, sickness, criminals, famine, poverty, terrorists, corruption, and con men operating everywhere in the world, all the time.

This leads us to the question of whether any head of state, including President Obama, has the right or authority in a democracy to decide what is fair for all the people. Politicians seem to believe that they have the job to decide what is fair for their constituents. For example, the other day both the Mayors of Chicago and Boston (who happened to be on the left side of our political spectrum) have decided because of their “authority”, that they will prevent Chick-Fil-A to open anymore stores in their cities because the founder/owner of the company supports the conventional definition of marriage. Is that fair? Why don’t they just not patronize Chick-Fil-A restaurants? That would be fairer! I don’t like Alec Baldwin’s politics, but I still go to his movies because he is a good actor and comedian, however, I have a choice not to and that would be fair. Wouldn’t it?

Our progressive tax system is another way to look at fairness. I think most of us accept the fact that those who can afford to pay more due to their income should, and thus we accept a progressive system. However, at what point does the system become unfair? A new Congressional budget office report shows that the share paid by the top 20% of income earners (those making more than $74k/yr.) pay nearly 70% of all federal taxes collected. The remaining 30% is borne by 80% of the taxpayers. In addition, the progressive trend in this group continues in the unfair direction. This same group paid 55% of all taxes in 1979; by 2009 their share was 68%. Over this same period the top 1% of wage earners paid 14% of all taxes in 1979 and now pays 22%.

By contrast, the bottom 20% paid a paltry 2% of total taxes in 1979 and now pays a minuscule 0.3%. After looking at this data, I have come to the conclusion that President Obama is right, the system isn’t fair, but not because the top 1% pay too little. It’s because they pay too much!

It’s clear from this that fairness is in the eyes of the beholder, and Mr. Obama is not the arbitrator of fairness. In fact, he is one opinion out of 300 million of us. When he told Joe the Plumber in 2008 that, “it’s only fair to spread the wealth around, right?” Who knew that a community organizer from South Chicago would be the sole judge of fairness for the United States?

Reflections on the Massacre in Aurora

My wife, Mary, and I like to go to the movies. We prefer movies that suit our demographic but also go to “pop” movies that reflect the current culture, so we can keep up with what is “in” with the younger generation. Therefore, we purchased tickets in advance to the new The Dark Knight Rises film of the Batman trilogy. After the horrendous tragedy in Aurora, Mary wanted to refund the tickets and was uneasy about going after seeing the TV coverage of the events. I convinced her that these events should not deter us from carrying on our normal life activities.

So we went to this now infamous movie and it turned out to be pretty awful, replete with an incoherent story line, an idiotic message, and the proverbial computer simulated destruction and violence scenes that seem to attract our youth in the adolescent and early college age groups. I agonized that people had to die just over a midnight showing of this trash.

This is a generation raised on video games as the prime source of entertainment and diversion, where the number of people you kill or vehicles you blow up in the shortest amount of time, is a measure of your skill and hand-eye coordination. In my generation, your ability to hit a baseball coming at you at high rate of speed, or to leap in the air and release a basketball and swish the basket, were measures of that same talent. In the process, you could burn some calories, build your developing body, and release the frustrations and pressures of growing up.

It appears to me that the deranged perpetrator of this horrific act is a product of this video game virtual world that eventually becomes reality, even for an apparently scholastically smart young man that is so mentally sick he cannot separate a Batman character from the real world.

It is also disturbing to observe how Hollywood, in the name of money, can put together a film that equates a video game to the real world, and gives actors ridiculous lines, and creates scripts that no normal person would believe has any semblance of reality, and results in many young people flocking to it like they are about to observe some artistically satisfying experience.

You say, “George, don’t get so high and mighty, it’s only entertainment and people don’t really act that way. This is an aberration!” Well, I have seen too many of these events in recent years that are not spontaneous acts of crazy people, but rather diabolical and planned acts of misguided and mentally trouble people who have easy access to weapons and devices of mass killing and destruction. Yes, we will always have evil people who commit horrible acts, but this kind of trend is a direct result of the permissiveness and lower standards in the “entertainment” that we expose to our less mature generations.

The Internet is a marvelous tool for information, communication, and learning, but it is unrestricted and therefore also a source of perversion and pornography, where curious minds can type in a browser and get access to things they cannot process and that provide them with an unseemly view of life and predators. This is a dangerous world in many ways, and technology is wonderful when channeled in the right direction.

As I am writing this, I am watching a prayer ritual in the city of Aurora, CO. My heart goes out to the victims and their families and the many heroes that arose from the depths of this dastardly act. I feel great admiration for the courage and decency of people who will risk their lives to help others in distress. It was illustrated on 9/11 in NYC and in other recent events like this, and gives me great faith in the goodness of our people.