The point I want to make, and this time in a very direct manner, is that being rich has gotten out of hand. It's vastly overrated and should cease immediately to be a reason for treating people better. I've hobnobbed in my career with the supposed mighty and rubbed elbows at Pebble Beach, The Plaza, and The Rainbow Room. I've been escorted around rooms as an author or speaker to meet people who could buy everything I own with the snap of a finger. I've listened ad nauseum to people with vast wealth who thought it was my place to do so, whose changes of subject always reverted back to them, and whose cufflinks or briefcases alone could nearly fix the levees in New Orleans. I watched as an extraordinarily wealthy man and his wife stepped over to my table at a charity dinner while I was dancing to steal my teddy bear table gift even though they could have bought the factory that manufactured it. I've met many such people and I can now say, other than in terms of research, it was largely a decided waste of time.
As a nation we urgently need to develop a disdain for people who are transfixed on wealth. We should never allow them to take public office -- never again. Sure, they can be wealthy, but obsessed with becoming ever more so or feathering the nests of their wealthy friends should exclude them from an ounce of our respect. We should honor, instead, people who have the courage to be less wealthy in order to assure that others do not suffer or who do so in order to find time to make positive contributions or even to be with their families. The CEO who refuses to take a huge salary when people at his company are being laid off or tolerating reduced salaries and the shareholders (wherever they are) who stand up and say, "Money isn't the only issue here." They should be the people we want to meet, the ones we long to listen to and the ones who we admire.
It's very important for people with extraordinary wealth combined with phenomenal selfishness to know that they too are going to die. I hate to be the harbinger of bad news, but it's the truth. Most act as if they're going to be spared. They're hoarding for the future. What future? They have enough for a multitude of futures. And such people are wreaking havoc on our futures in the process.
I used to tell my children, somewhat tongue in cheek, that the people in the really big houses were probably unhappy. "Right, mom," they'd reply laughing. "I've visited them," they'd argue, "and they don't look all that unhappy." So maybe I was wrong. But I know one thing and I still tell them this: Being wealthy is fine. If you have to step all over other people to get it, don't come home. Real wealth is what it has always been -- knowing you're a good person, having people truly love you, loving back, and doing some important things on this earth -- making a contribution. Being wealthy is having a comfort with honesty and a disdain for lies. It's the capacity to look into the eyes of someone who's suffering and know in your heart of hearts that you did not because of nameless greedy shareholders or due to neglect or avarice help put them there. We need to stop allowing a supposed tough beginning in life to excuse an insatiable hunger for more of what doesn't matter and start expecting, especially of our leaders, substance as persons, character, courage, and extraordinary generosity.
My father in his infinite wisdom used to say that education was not a way to become wealthy so much as something they can never take away from you. It was a vehicle to opportunity, but not a means of running rough shod over the rest of the world. Wealth is the same. It's a vehicle that should be handled with care. And when it is abused, when it becomes an end in and of itself, we should find it wanting and refuse to honor it, refuse to be a part of its shameless aggrandizement and never, ever, think for a moment that it is a sign of anything but ferocious disregard, an illness, a blight, and truly nothing more.