The Law of the Jungle

I am obsessed with this video; http://www.upworthy.com/2-monkeys-were-paid-unequally-see-what-happens-next?g=2.

If you don’t have time to watch it –it’s about two monkeys getting unequal payment (cucumbers and grapes) for doing the same task. It’s fascinating. Apparently, the idea of fairness is more organic than I had thought. What is also organic? The absolute indifference of the “rich” grape-getting monkey for her friends’ outrage.

Unfortunately, I have sat through too many conversations of grape eaters who not only have no compassion for their cucumber pals but even add an extra heap of scorn by blaming them. You can almost hear the grape monkey thinking, “Well, she’s obviously not working as hard as me. She must be doing the task wrong. She should pull herself up by her bootstraps.” 

The bootstrap argument has about as much relevance to monkeys as it does to humans.  Besides, I thought we had evolved . Not so much.

I heard that argument many times at my dinner table in upper middle-class Whittier. Yes, I grew up in the land of Nixon and yes, my father was a Republican.

I never quite got his argument or his total disdain for the poor. He had been very poor himself during the depression. Raised by a single mother after his alcoholic father had deserted her to raise two children alone. There was no social security or welfare then. No food stamps, WIC or anything to help  and I’m sure that many nights my father went to bed hungry.  You would have thought FDR would be a hero to such a man. He wasn’t. My father hated him.

I could understand my mother hating FDR a little better. After all her father had owned an Oldsmobile dealership during the depression and not everyone was poor. No, there were fat cats (almost the exact same ones as today) who could still buy a luxury car like an Oldsmobile. I doubt my mother was ever hungry a day in her life. For food.  And as we can see in the video, the rich monkeys don’t much care about the plight of their unfairly treated brethren. “Let them eat cucumber” the greedy little Marie Antoinette would say if she could. It was my mother’s grapes FDR was trying to share.

The irony of course, because life always provides us with ironic lessons, is that my father’s “bootstraps” said G.I. Bill on them and my mother is now completely living on welfare and medicare after having blown her money on 137 cats. (Please see earlier blog “It’s All in the Family” for that gripping tale.) How’s old FDR looking to you now, Mom? 

I believe what separates us from the animals is not intelligence but compassion.  Humans have the capacity to feel for others outside themselves, to walk in another humans shoes, to “do unto others.” Why some people develop it and others don’t is a mystery. I think the myth of American Individualism takes a lot of the blame, as does our national disdain for being “soft.” Brute strength is our national pastime. If you don’t believe me check out sales of steroids. Or how many gyms promise to “pump you up!” 

Even though the Christian religion is all about helping the poor there doesn’t seem to be a lot of action in that direction. It confuses me even more than my atheist father did. Christians say they believe in a deity called Jesus who was a poor carpenter. He extolled his followers to give up all they had to follow him. I don’t think he was speaking to just the 12 disciples, I think he was telling everyone that if you want to be a true disciple of his you had to shed the outer skin of wealth.  I don’t need to tell you that’s not the official policy of most churches, right? Instead of spending their wealth on digging wells in Africa or sending food to the Sudan, they build mega churches with comfortable seats, state-of-the-art sound systems replete with golden idols. I doubt Jesus would come in these churches, temples and cathedrals and say, “Yup, this is what I had in mind.” 

Perhaps Americans are already too full of grapes to feel compassion. For true compassion comes from suffering. Not just suffering but the recognition that you are suffering. Then comes the important thought – if it feels shitty to me to suffer it must feel shitty to others to suffer, perhaps I can help them. That aha moment when you realize that suffering and inequity is NOT caused by a single person and his or her deficient boot straps but by circumstances beyond his control. By birthplace, color of skin, size, physical and mental health and mostly by class.  My father was a poor boy who became rich –but NOT by himself. He had help even if he would never admit it.

The irony, again, is that by the society raising my father from poor to rich it helped itself. By going to college and becoming a white collar worker my father repaid that GI Bill many times over by simply paying taxes on a larger income. He helped fuel the bustling 1950’s economy by buying stuff, investing and raising a family who also had a better chance to do the same. It wasn’t even altruism, it was good economics!

Still, I believe FDR was not motivated by anything other than compassion. He was one of the rare rich people who cared that his fellow monkeys only had cucumbers. The fact that he was suffering a debilitating and painful disease may have had something to do with it. He joined the ranks of Siddhartha and Gandhi –also of wealthier families, who shed their wealth to follow the path of love and compassion. 

Irony. It’s coming. Siddhartha was a Buddhist and Gandhi a Hindu. Neither was a Christian and yet they embodied the teachings of Jesus in a way Jimmy Swaggert and his ilk never could or would.

“What in hell does any of this have to do with you, Nancy, and your crazy brain?” you ask if you’re still reading.

I’ll tell you. My crazy brain is either a gift or a curse. It depends on how I use it. I can be bitter and sad (which I am sometimes) or I can see it as a conduit to reach other people. Maybe touch their similar suffering. Ease it a tiny bit by showing them they are not alone. Or deficient. Or to blame. 

We got the short end of the sanity stick. Full stop. How we view it is up to us.

 What we do with it is up to us. Me? I’m gonna talk about it.

And pass the grapes.