Romney or Buddha?

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Dear Mitt,

No one pulls themselves up by their own bootstraps. We all depend on the labor of others from the pangs of our mother’s womb. We are interconnected as drops of dew on a web. Every dollar we claim to earn on Wall Street represents the sweat of factories, here or abroad, whose workers must forfeit the fruits of their labor to us.

And if we call rich people job creators, then we must call immigrant field hands food creators. Each leaf in our salad, each bean in our coffee, each spoonful of warm soup served on our white linens, we enjoy not only through our labor, but through the grace of calloused palms, aching shoulders, long days of toil by Third World villagers or undocumented farm workers, too often disdained by the very elites who eat from their fingers.

The money in our pockets is not ours only. It is stained with the tears and toil of others. Every dollar is a human community.

Independence is a myth. We are inter-dependent, each upon all. And the rich are especially dependent on the work of the poor.

~ Published in the Olympian and the Tacoma News Tribune, week of Jan 23, 2012