Known as the monied class or moneyed people. Two different spellings of the same group. They’re the ruling class controlled by a handful of powerful elites. Nameless, faceless entities of ruthless, corrupt governments, the evils of organized religion, and blatant corporate greed. Some say money makes the world go round; others argue it’s the root of all evil. It changes everything, controlling people in every aspect of modern society that we associate with the economic aspects of day-to-day living. Paycheck to paycheck, the debt grows. From well-to-do to millionaires, billionaires, trillionaires, and beyond. Wealth, like religion, is in bad faith, often called the opiate of the masses, the hardest pill to swallow.
From the book of Revelations, 6:15–17: “Then the kings of the earth, the princes, the generals, the rich, the mighty, and everyone else, both slave and free, hid in caves and among the rocks of the mountains. They called to the mountains and the rocks, ‘Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb!’”
Sounds like today’s daily news. You don’t need a gold toilet to sit on the commode throne to rule and ruin; rue the decades of blood, slaughtered, sacrificed, and laid bare to die in some faraway land, fighting for vagaries. War, the great enemy of equality. Just as long as it's not in your neighborhood or backyard. No weapons or mass destruction to distract from the truth. You don’t need to bury your head in the sand to know the world is constantly on a carnival ride to chaos. Dreams offer dismay. With a dwindling bank account and the balance of a new world order in your flimsy wallet.
Barter your soul for a bigger piece of pie and the promise of prosperity in some heavenly afterlife. You can buy your way into the kingdom. An exclusive club. The installment plan of future prosperity was deferred. Temporarily, until the check clears. How ignorant can one be to believe that the rich care about the poor? When your dreams come at a price you could never pay. Born into this poverty of the soul of in a bankrupt nation, we wallow in shoddy trinkets and shiny objects that bring no joy. Money is God for too many reasons.
You’re not invited. The wicked will never allow us to breathe the same air as them. It stinks just how fishy they are. Whoever said money can’t buy happiness never had any money to begin with. The richest people could solve all the world’s woes in half a day. Their greed is greater than their need to make the world a better, safer place. There’s no profit in helping the helpless. What’s in it for them to gain the world and lose their souls? Could it be they never had a soul from the get-go? If they had, would we be in this mess today? The rejection of money-changers whipped and thrown out, bum rushed from the sacred temple.
The poor are used to their constant dread and despair because they must get on with the business of life, with work for slave wages, along with the demands made day after day, hour after worthless hour.
Georges Joseph Christian Simenon (1903–1989) was a Belgian writer. A prolific author who published nearly 500 novels and numerous short works, Simenon writes of the poor from the books of Maigret:
Maigret and the Hundred Gibbets
How strange, and yet how inevitable, that despair should curl its tail like a silent cat in the dim corners of the human breast, unnoticed by those who glance hurriedly past in their polished shoes. The poor, those quiet custodians of unspoken sorrows, perform a ballet of endurance, a subtle choreography of survival refined through centuries of necessity. Their despair is not a cry; it is a hush, a gentle lowering of the eyelids in the morning light, the secret sigh between the scraping of a chair and the scratch of a pen. It dwells not in the loud theater of sentiment but in the tiny, trembling spaces of everyday labor, an invisible manuscript written in gestures, pauses, and the faint tremor of a hand holding a worn cup of tea.
Simenon whispers this truth, but one can imagine Faulkner or even Dostoevsky leaning close to nod in secret approval, for the faint shadow of suffering is a universe unto itself. And there, in the murmur of these hidden lives, beauty and tragedy entangle like twin vines, impossible to separate: the poetry of restraint, the music of endurance. One might say the world conspires to teach the poor the art of silence. The elegance of suppressed lament, and in that quiet mastery lies an understated grandeur, a testament to the human spirit that is at once humble and magnificent.
Nobody suffers like the poor. The greedy old white men who lord and hoard their will and power always want more. The despair is palpable.