"Consider the ravens: they don't sow, they don't reap, they have no warehouse or barn, and God feeds them. How much more valuable are you than birds!" Luke 12:24

A young Hispanic woman boarded the 25-cent, trolley-like Electrobus on Washington Avenue in Miami South Beach the other day. She immediately noticed the black man who was lying down and squirming on the back seat of the bus, grimacing, holding his jaw, complaining of a toothache. I was somewhat amused by his behavior, but her expression was one of indignation, as if she had been personally insulted by his panhandling antics.

He said he needed regular bus fare to get downtown, to Jackson Memorial Hospital, because, or so he said, a Miami Beach clinic had taken all the money he had - $ 8 in tips for helping parking lot attendants - yet the dentist would not do anything for him unless he brought in $ 500 cash.

The story was not incredible as far as I was concerned, for I was in a similar predicament shortly before Christmas. A receptionist for a South Beach dentist insisted that I bring in $ 1,000 in cash and show it to her before the dentist would examine me for an infected gum and loose teeth. But I had only $ 200.

"Go to Jackson Memorial," she said.

Another South Beach dentist did see me, after I pleaded with his receptionist, saying all I wanted was an antibiotic because I could not afford dental work at the time. He charged me $ 200, for an examination, a prescription, and a $ 7,400 estimate. As it turned out, a practical nurse in my building examined my sore gum and loose teeth and said I was developing scurvy. I began to eat fruit and take vitamins every day, and the severe condition disappeared.

But the man on the Electrobus was merely acting, and his apparent insincerity made a clown of him; no doubt a few courses in Method Acting would have made his act more convincing. The indignant woman, without looking directly at him proceeded to bad mouth him, for all to hear in Spanish - I knew enough Spanish (culo, puto, cabron) to get the gist of her calumny. The bus driver and passengers guffawed roundly.

"The man might be better off in Venezuela," I said to her in English.  "Chavez would have the Cuban dentists work on him and give him a bag of food."

"I have to work!" she exclaimed. "I hate people like him."

"It sounds like you hate work, not him. Maybe you envy him.”

"Como?"

"I think you envy him. I don't want to live like him," I went on.  "He can have his life."

"Puto!" - she spit the word towards the panhandler. "He should work!"

"I'd love to have your job right now. I'm glad he won't be competing with me to replace you if you lose your job. Maybe we should pay people like him not to apply for jobs we want."

"Stupid gringo!" - she glared at me and got off the bus.

I understood her sentiment. I really don't care for panhandlers myself, particularly those who are competent to hold down some sort of a job. Successful panhandlers might make a fortune panhandling at higher levels, say as salesmen or corporate confidence men. We find bums everywhere. CEOs, many of whom should be defenestrated from their high offices and whose work is really worth no more than a hundred grand a year, knock down millions per year, perhaps because they perversely believed the maxim, "Ask and ye shall receive." Panhandling is a kind of theft. Yet we duly note that, at the bottom of our being, we are all bums, dependent for our living on the graces of higher powers in the beginning; our parents, for example, if not the All Mighty. We are made to work for our keep, hence work makes people mean: a hard-working person who still wants to get something for nothing might resent and envy the born rich and the moochers.

I've noticed of late that many relatively comfortable people not only fear and despise unemployed poor people; they envy them as well. Furthermore, not only might the poor envy the rich, the rich might envy the poor, particularly when the poor are unemployed or idle and feeding off the public largesse, a right once reserved for the idle rich. What was once a blessing for the idle few is sinful for all. Work is purportedly the only cure for sloth; no labor-saving device may save enough labor to save us from laboring night and day to save labor-in-itself. 

The dignity of labor espoused by unpaid monks in the good old days has finally taken hold at the highest levels, to the end that that everyone now feels compelled to work regardless of status and circumstance. The willing worker does not have a political right to a job in a "free" labor market, yet she or he has a moral obligation to work. She or he must never stop working at something or the other: when not engaged in productive endeavors, let both him and her work at consumption so others may also be moved to produce and consume. Thus are our  physical and spiritual spheres smothered by goods that appear to be so much garbage, trash and junk, at least to transcendentally inclined ascetics whose basic needs are barely met.

The number of Hindu mendicants and the idea that they have a right to alms certainly does not say very much for the spiritual value of the work ethic in India. Here in America, if people were privileged to live anywhere they could pitch a tent or some other form of shelter, and if they had a right to be fed enough to subsist on, perhaps half the population would abandon their jobs and flee to the hills or beaches. No doubt the other, more invidious half would round them up in work camps - if that half were put in concentration camps and the other half assigned to manage them for their own good, full employment would be at hand.

But utopia is not at hand in any shape or form. May the Landlord of landlords forbid it. Everyone must toil at something useful or useless whether they like it or not. Many of them must work at jobs and for bosses they hate, producing luxuries and wasteful things they do not want or need, simply to have a bite to eat, their own toilet and bed. When impoverished people and lazy bums seek  handouts instead of alms, they are envied and despised accordingly.

The idle rich who once took pride in feeding crumbs to the pigeons are no longer idle; or so it seems:  many of them pull down multi-million dollar salaries and claim corporate messiah status. When poor folk flock to free food and housing, hard-working rich folks - many of whom have inherited their fortune or the seed money to make it - claim that free food and housing has made the beneficiaries poor, therefore aid to them should be cut back for their own good. Of course on the next Sunday we hear that it is just as sinful to hate the rich as it is to hate the poor.

As much as he might despise lazy underdogs, the well-appointed man, ensconced in his pleasure palace behind his nation's big guns, secretly envies terrorists who revolt against his System, and projects his envy onto them:

"They are cowards; they envy our democratic way of life: they envy our freedom to jet about the globe, to live in our palatial homes, to ride in our limousines and to buy mink coats for our wives. Poverty is no excuse, so let us not be distracted by the roots of terrorism. The underclass, regardless of race, color and creed, could have what we have, but they are unwilling to work hard to get things, and now they would bite our hands, the very hands that might feed them if they were good workers. As a matter of fact, and as everyone can see, they want to be jobless and houseless."

Yet the poor are encouraged to go forth in holy wedlock and multiply by neoconservatives, some of who think the victims of national disasters somehow caused the disasters to happen in order to be homeless. No doubt military service will make a men out of them if recruited in time. Let them make war on one another to keep the mill grinding and to solve the population problem they are causing.

As workhorses and wage slaves know very well, the American Tao is not as free as advertised. Although envy is for the birds,  envy must be constantly cultivated by the sponsors and advertisers of the gilded individualism cult in order to maintain the social inequality of the false scarcity system and keep the Wheel turning.

People crushed by the Wheel believe they are responsible for their fate. They may even believe the milling process brings them closer to their god at the top of the Wheel, just as many Jews in the death camps believed they were being punished for their guilt hence seldom revolted. Indeed, most Americans would rather fight than switch systems. Yet the power elite and their middle-class emulators have good cause to fear if not envy displaced people, for millenarian hysteria surfaces from time to time, and the masses may run riot.

No, we must not hate the rich; nor should we envy them very much - a special sort of psycho-social therapy has been devised to relieve the alienated plight of the wealthy. Envy is methodically albeit subtly inculcated in every child in almost every school today. The internal contradictions of the secular as well as the sacred teachings frustrate children into a stereotypical, competitive response to every problem. Somehow, if everyone will overcharge each other and try to get as much as they can for the least effort, everything will be all right in the long run and our System will be the envy and salvation of the world. On the other hand, everyone must make work and work hard at it to keep up the appearance of propriety as we know it, and that is not an enviable position to be in.