Let Them Keep It

The men at the counter of the diner where I eat breakfast got to talking last week about the very rich, the kind of men who own boats bigger than my house and houses they hardly ever visit. A few of them shook their heads. I put down my coffee and said, let them keep it. The table went quiet, and then most of them nodded. That is the kind of men I eat breakfast with.

I want to be honest about why I said it, because I think a lot of my readers feel the same way and have never put it into words. I will never be a billionaire. Neither will anybody at that counter. None of us will ever be close. I know that, and I defend them anyway, and I would defend them tomorrow. It is not that I expect to join them. It is that I like knowing they are there.

There is something in a working man that wants to look up and see somebody standing very high. It is the same thing that makes a boy at the county rodeo lean over the rail to watch the champion ride. He is never going to sit a bull like that. He does not want the man thrown. He just likes knowing somebody can stay on that long. I feel that way about the men at the very top. It makes my own seat on the rail feel like it is worth something.

People try to stir up resentment over this. They want me to sit down with a pencil and compare what those men put in the collection plate of this country against what the waitress who refills my coffee puts in. I have never done that arithmetic, and I am not inclined to start. Suppose I did. What would I do with the answer? I would only be angry, and it is no use being angry at a man you will never meet.

So I spend my anger closer to home, where it does some good. I have a neighbor down the road who votes the other way from me, and I can work up a real head of steam over him. He drives the same kind of truck I do. He works the same kind of hours. His wife and mine shop at the same store and complain about the same prices. I do not much like him. That feels right to me. A man needs somebody to be against, and it ought to be somebody he can see from his porch.

This fall’s election will bring a lot of talk about who is on whose side. I already know whose side I am on. I am on the side of a man’s right to keep what he has, all of it, even if it is more than his grandchildren’s grandchildren could spend, and even if my own side of that arrangement never seems to grow.

I will be voting for my party’s man for the Senate, because I want it left that way. I am told the other fellow wants to close some of the doors the very rich use to keep what they have, and I would not want them closed on my account.

Let them keep it. They were never going to share it with me anyway.