I have always admired the rich.
It has always perplexed me how some people end up rich and others poor.
I know of no society where all the people are rich. Nor do I know of any where the people are all poor.
Forget all those political theorists who talk of a society where there is equality and none is rich or poor.
They can dream on.
In real life, things don’t work that way. Even when humankind lived in caves, there would be a family that went hunting and killed more wildlife and other families who would come back with nothing.
In the context of those times, the family that had more meat was wealthy and the starving souls were poor.
So the issue of why some are rich and others poor is as old as mankind.
Anyway, given that no one has ever answered the question to my satisfaction, I have concluded there must be an invisible hand which, at birth, determines who is destined to be poor and who will be rich. But even to this view there are more questions than answers.
If God decides who should be rich or poor then why was His son one of the most impoverished blokes to walk this earth?
I suspect if Jesus was not so poor he would have lived beyond thirty three years. After all, poor people have a shorter life expectancy. So it can’t be God making the decision. Otherwise all the rich people who don’t give a damn about him and do all the things He says should not be done, would not be rich.
Even the great thinkers of the world have failed to answer this question. It is a conundrum more difficult than the most complex maths problem. It is a question that has baffled our ancestors and will no doubt remain a mystery till the end of the world.
On this continent, you get traditional medicine men who claim they are able to make their clients wealthy. When you scrutinise them they are dirt poor and you wonder how, pathetic as they are, they can deliver on their promise.
Some people are rich because they are born into rich families. As a matter of course, they should be rich. Indeed there are those who take care of the family fortune and remain rich for generations to come. But within this group, others, despite being born rich, will fritter away all that fortune and end up joining the ranks of the poor.
On the other end of the scale, there are those born into terrible poverty. By some means, they are able to lift themselves out of squalor and misery and achieve fabulous wealth.
They do so having left their erstwhile counterparts drowning in the sorrow of poverty.
Then there are those who, despite being nice and kind to everybody, never make that all important break and remain in poverty for the rest of their lives.
It is a strange thing, wealth.
How about easy going people who never lift a finger and have never done a day’s hard work and yet grow richer and richer. These are the people with the magic wand, for whom everything they touch turns to gold. I am tempted to believe the whole thing boils down to luck.
Methinks it is just plain luck that chooses whether one becomes poor or gets rich. But this premise throws up another question. Why some are people so lucky that they can become rich and why are others so unlucky they remain poor?
Neither has this matter got anything to do with intelligence. The whole thing has nothing to do with the size of one’s brain.
The world is awash with brilliant minds that have never attained wealth. They go around speaking big English and yet at night they sleep hungry like the rest of us.
Now look at all those dumb people who are rich. When you make a cursory survey, you can identify all your former schoolmates who were smart but are not rich.
I certainly can identify a few friends from school who were very dumb but are today living in splendour and opulence. These are people who copied from you and made it a point to always sit nearby in class.
I just don’t get it.
There is nothing as demoralising as coming across a boy who bunked class, made crude jokes, was disrespectful to teachers and smoked during break time, now grown up and very rich. This is the boy, now meeting you as a grown up who continues cracking his crude jokes from school and nonchalantly wonders why you remain poor and yet you were much smarter than him in class. He is the kind of boy who can lead you to denounce all the benefits of school as hype, by telling you that he never had much faith in education and that is why he is so rich.
We poor people always celebrate the downfall of the wealthy. We have many examples from school of arrogant children from rich families who led lives of misery once their parents fell into poverty. Didn’t we celebrate?
Yet today, grown up, you meet that rude girl, from a rich family who was very cute and smart in class, only to learn that after all the years, her family is even richer.
Clearly there is no formula to wealth or poverty. Which is why going into my middle age I am still trying to crack the wealth code. I have tried everything to no avail.
Yet with every passing year, I see people who don’t have half my brain swimming in so much money they don’t know what to do with it.
Okay, I can understand those who worked hard for it. But as for those who never lifted a finger and were attacked by wealth whilst innocently going about their lives, I can only despair.
I have decided I am giving it one more year. Yep one more year!
If I don’t get rich then I give up.
I will then proceed to be rude to everyone because being nice all my life has not brought me wealth.
I will pull my kids from school because it’s useless. Why should they waste so much time listening to equally poor teachers telling them fairytales that won’t make them rich. Better they take their chances like all those illiterate people who are so rich and can’t even count their money.
I will ban my partner from going to church because no amount of praying will make us rich.
If she protests, I will tell her that if God failed to make His son rich what chance in hell do we have!
