Ignore Ants

Today the tiny group of the very wealthy, those now generally called "the 1%," are in a position particularly estranged from the common man on the street (or at home with no job, or standing in the park with others protesting our current mess), and quite possibly cannot see the rest of us at all.  To those extremely wealthy folks in their ivory towers, we of the 99% are too far below to even be in view; we are simply the ants of society - going about our mundane business, crawling over obstacles as best we can, struggling to bring home some tiny morsel to help us survive.  The super-rich are quite removed from the common man.  They hardly know about our survival plight, and except for Warren Buffett and possibly one or two others of great character, they prefer to ignore us.  Ignore ants can be their simple mantra; we are nothing to them.

But now some few of the vaunted rich are having to deal with the ants that have begun to spoil their picnic.  Oh, it isn't actually possible to affect them substantially, but it is not as easy at the moment for them to completely ignore the ants.

What amazes me today, where I reside among quasi intelligent folks, is that many of the less destitute ants in our society are superficially separating themselves from the rest of the 99% and appear to be cultivating a kinship to the 1% in some kind of wishful thinking, I suppose.  Or just bone-headed NON-thinking is more likely.  Some who are comfortable, in that they no longer need to struggle mightily to survive, want to see themselves as part of the upper crust of society and can no longer identify with the low-life types who are not so fortunate.  Many (perhaps most) of today's low-lifes have merely the bad luck of bad timing to thank for their condition of near poverty.  Only a few of the more fortunate among us can admit (or even realize) that they were the beneficiaries of some dumb luck along the way, the timing that fell just right for them to become comfortable while others continued to struggle.  Some of these folks have become the self-righteous ants who can look down upon the poor ants and try to ignore them.  But the vantage point these people hold, being only a notch or two above the dirt-poor, does not allow them to completely ignore the ants, it allows them only to feel superior.  Having to deal each day with all those others, the destitute and maybe ragged and ugly ants, keeps the slightly successful ants from being actually capable of completely ignoring them in the manner the 1% can.  So they end up just sounding smug and hateful.

A person of generally good demeanor, possessing a passion for life and pleased to be part of his society, can become involved in matters he might not have foreseen.  For example, thousands of society's ants are gathering in cities all around our struggling nation to participate in the Occupy movement.  Who are these folks who can take the time and effort to do this and feel it is the right thing to do?  Most are those who are out of work, looking into the face of poverty, seeing their chance of ever attaining part of The American Dream completely crumbling before them.

Who are the people criticizing these ne'r-do-wells, these thugs, these law-breakers (I hear these ugly slurs daily) who are causing disruption to our way of life?  Well, in most cases, the cruel critics are people who might themselves be in the Occupy groups but for the timing.  A neighbor in my community who is a senior citizen, living well in his paid-for home, enjoying his Social Security every month along with his larger monthly income from a solid pension he paid into during his good years of employment, somehow can look upon those protesters with disdain.  And but for the timing, but for his good luck, he could easily be one of them himself.  He'd prefer to think he is better than that, that he would never be such a rebel or lawless punk.  He simply refuses to mentally put himself into someone else's shoes for a moment.  Yet had he not met with the good fortune, the dumb luck, many years ago, he could easily have been marching with his fellow trouble-makers and living outside in the elements under the watchful eye of armed police, looking like a lawless mob on the newscasts, getting no respect from the comfortable ants of his society.  Odds are fairly strong that his own father would have been one of the dirty and miserable law-breakers among the great throngs of desperate marchers in the nineteen-thirties.

Any one of us who is less destitute than those marching in America's cities to call attention to the vast inequality of our financial system, should at least have a little empathy.  The protesters are there for the rest of us who are too comfortable, too afraid, too blind regarding the inequality or just too lazy to be there ourselves.

As to looking down on these ants of society, trying to assume the lofty position of that tiny 1% in our views of the Occupy crowd, it doesn't work for us comfortable ants.  When we try to ignore ants, it reveals a condition with a slightly different pronunciation.  Try putting the emphasis on the "ig" and see how it expresses that condition.  Trying to ignore ants makes us guilty of simple ignor-ants.  Ignorance is the proper spelling. 

We who are the luckier of the 99% are still in this mess with the unlucky; we still owe them our respect when they try to improve the world for us all.  Those who refuse to accept this simple fact and who look down upon and belittle the Occupy movement are not somehow raising themselves above the throngs of the abused; they are still being abused themselves.  They just aren't yet feeling the worst of the punishment being doled out by the Wall Street system.  Folks who have been successful enough that they are not yet desperate are still far from approaching membership in that small group of the filthy rich.  They are willfully choosing to live in filthy ignorance!  And the horrifying prospect of all this lies in the willful ignorance that will guide these folks when they step into a voting booth.

[Here's an interesting further word-play irony:  the comfortable ants are sneering at the down-trodden ants who are willing to march in protest on behalf of ALL ants.  Disrespecting the protest ants.  That's right - many who feel superior to the protest ants are themselves protestants!  And it's not all just the emphasis on syllables - it's the emphasis on character.  Odd little twist, is it not?]