Happy New year everyone. By now, most of you are back to the regular working routine and trying to figure out how to pay for the holiday expenses. I myself am trying to wean my way off a diet that included fudge as a major food group. So much for a healthy lifestyle.
Like many others in the work force, we begin the year with hopes that the epic recession of recent years will become a distant memory and that perhaps our jobs might be a tad more secure. The past couple of years have been dicey to say the least, and while most of us have scrimped to get by or amassed big debt to cover expenses, there are those for whom the economic downturn had little if any noticeable effect.
Recently an Ottawa-Based group with the lofty title of the Canadian Centre on Policy Alternatives (CCPA) revealed that the nation's top 100 CEOs earned an average of $6.6 million in 2009 while the average Canadian made about $43K. If you're not to keen on math, here's the figure you need to know: those CEO salaries amount to 155 times that of the average Canadian.
Of course, the timing of the report is aimed at a news cycle hungry for post-holiday stories related to the financial woes of the vast majority of the country. Still, the numbers are jarring.
Add to this mix the number of celebrities who make obscene amounts of cash, a few of which seem to do little to warrant any compensation, and all of the professional athletes with bulging wallets, and the gap quickly becomes a chasm.
If we look in the opposite direction of the economic scale, we see hundreds of millions in developing nations struggling daily for the basic necessities of life.
Something is wrong with this picture.
Over the years, society has developed some clever ways to intellectually dodge this issue. Suggesting that the rich should be required to contribute a larger portion of their wealth to create equality of opportunity is quickly labelled socialist or communist. In a free-market economy, with the emphasis on free, as in the freedom to take as much as you want without the pressure to share, personal wealth is often considered an entitlement.
Maybe the problem isn't so much wealth, but the way in which it is regarded. Is our disdain with society's gazillionaire's really about social inequality or is it that what we really want is our cut?
Prior to the holidays, comedian Bill Maher created a hilarious and thought-provoking video message that wondered aloud if North America's newest and most popular religion had become stuff. Here is the link if you missed it.
The observation that religious fervour is not dissimilar to our obsession with wealth is a brilliant and revealing notion. In both cases, we are easily fixated by those things that serve our own personal needs while at the same time seeking to separate ourselves from others. What is the difference between considering oneself lucky and considering oneself chosen?
It would be easy to blame religion or spirituality or wealth for what ails society, but concepts alone cannot be at fault. If our faith lies in money to answer our problems we are doomed to failure. So too, if our faith is placed solely in ritual and institutions to find meaning, we are likely to find ourselves lost rather than found.
The New Year is a good time to de-clutter our lives, to get a fresh start. It's also a good time to consider the year of opportunities that lie ahead. Instead of wondering if the New Year will be good for us, maybe we should be considering how it could be better for others.
Wealth will come and go. Spirituality can centre us, but without action it achieves little. The one thing we do share is this new beginning.
What we do with it will define where our faith really lies.
Happy 2011.
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