We All Care . . . But Will We Pay 17 Cents More For A Burger?

To yesterday’s note on LGBT progress (Deviants No More) I added an update.  Yes, Sports Illustrated is featuring a gorgeous trans woman in its swimsuit issue; but there’s also this: today, the world’s most valuable company is helmed by a proud gay man.

(AAPL, at $1.6 trillion, is valued at $65 billion more than MSFT, $100 billion more than AMZN — and nearly 9 times as much as Exxon.)

As noted yesterday, being gay wasn’t always so easy.

In places like Russia and Mississippi, let alone Chechnya, it still isn’t.

J Ebert: “Thank goodness my grandchildren never had to go through all that!”

Amen.

Imagine an entire world without racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia or ethnic strife – where everybody lived by the advice we all got from our mothers when we were five: “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

Or as Barack Obama puts it: “be kind and be useful.”

We can land humans on the moon but not figure out how to be nice to each other?

Come ON, people!

Which leads me to today’s topic.

Everyone — on both sides of the aisle — professes to care about other people.

Most really do.

“Personally,” wrote one such person in 2017, “I’m happy to pay an extra 4.3 percent for my burger if it means the person making it for me can afford to feed their own family. If you aren’t willing to fork over an extra 17 cents for a Big Mac, you’re a fundamentally different person than I am.”

Take a minute to read her whole story and see whether you think she likely votes Democrat or Republican.  She doesn’t say.

Those who vote Republican — against the minimum wage, against health care for all, against higher taxes on billionheirs, against refinancing federal student debt, against environmental regulations, against universal background checks . . . will say that charity and free market forces are more effective at helping people than government redistribution and regulation.

But as wonderful as charity is, it’s not without its own administrative costs . . . and as wonderful as the free market is, without regulation it produces misery and despair.  (See: Charles Dickens’ London.)

At the end of the day, that disagreement is what this election is about. That, and restoring the soul of the nation.  Where, despite our differences, we’re all pretty much pulling for each other.

Final thought:

Japan has had fewer than 1,000 COVID deaths, Robin Masters tweeted earlier this month. “It is 12 times more densely populated than the US, and they have more elderly per capita than any other nation. They never did a complete lockdown. How did they do it? Virtually everyone wears a mask. So simple. We look ridiculous.”

Spread the word, not the virus.

Restore the soul of the nation.

Have a great weekend.