Dear Editor:
Imagine that you are a Cabby with your last fare and you are aching to get home, but they won’t leave until you give them 10 percent of your fares for the day. Say you are a waitress finishing the morning rush, and your last table says they are going to camp out unless you fork out over 10 percent of your tips before the tip out. Pretty ridiculous.
Now imagine you have to sell a building with tenants. I didn’t say “want to” because there isn’t a choice. You were good to them, no complaints, all utilities included, and free laundry. The owner dies and the property, which is losing money, must be sold. Now your tenants say if effect, “We don’t care that it’s you life’s work, or how you are hurting, or that we are not entitled, but the laws enables us hold you up for years regardless of sin or virtue., and lawyers say we can get away with this, so unless you want us to ruin you, pay up! Oh, but we will be “nice,” because after all we are “good” people and this is only “smart” negotiation, and so we will only demand 10 percent off the top of the sale, and if this seems outrageous to you, it’s not our fault. While we are technically adults, we refuse to own our behavior.”
Best of all, this is real, really real, as in happening right now. So while you change Hoboken politics, how about some rent reform to protect the small business from extortion? I have cared about tenants my whole life, but they are gung ho to turn on me anyway. There is no sin by someone else that makes it right to wreck my life for fun and profit.
A lot of people in this country talk about God and morality in sex and procreation, politics and business, but when it comes to their chance to grab the “almighty’ dollar, it becomes “gimme, gimme” with both hands, and the Devil take the hindmost be they stranger, neighbor, or even family. It is clear that when someone says how “good” they are and they will clean our society up, they are just looking for their turn at the trough, taking all they can, as fast as they can, and hypocrites to our faces. The way that “ordinary” people use lawyers to steal, i.e. dis-organized crime is so much more genteel than the organized crime method of knee breaking, but it still devastates victims.
It all eventually gets in the paper, on the news, and over the internet, and it is supposed to shame us all into good behavior. However, it’s never our fault, our responsibility, or our job, and some “they” always makes us do it, so how can we feel shame when our hands are “clean?” That purity is an illusion because we actually refuse to look at our dirty hands, to look at what we do. If we did, we might actually have to judge ourselves as wanting. If we looked in the mirror, we might catch ourselves mouthing that “If it’s not nailed down, it’s mine, and if I can pry it loose, then it’s not nailed down.” From the huge multi-national corporation, to your neighbor, our society is declining and I have a new Pledge for it. Put your hands on your hearts and say:
I pledge allegiance to the buck,
And I don’t care who came before,
I passed on debts to our kids,
To generations I can ignore.
I will not build, invent, or make,
And the environment be damned,
For I will skim, and I will take,
That’s how I have it planned.
I will lie to all the world,
That I am good, and I am proud,
I will see my country fall to ruin,
Wave the flag and say out loud:
“Its’ not my fault!”
Friedrich Hass