Tilt!

Just one date last week I watched the accompanying video. I remember being really shocked at the time. I knew that the disparity in this country was great, but this graphic makes it graphic . And then on Sunday a church, I saw it again: it was part of the service that we call "the holy word." Which, as you have probably surmised, can be a video – or a poem, or a news story, or something off of a blog, or another piece of writing. The point is to get us thinking and to get us thinking about how to be Christians within whatever context this holy word puts us into.



And has certainly something wrong with the gross disparity of the income in the United States, or the wealth distribution in this country. To my mind, it's a moral issue. There are millions of people in this country to go to bed at night hungry. That is detestable in a country like this that's so rich. And it's intolerable when most of those hungry people are children. What possible argument can anyone make that this situation is okay? It's not okay. It's a crime, and it's immoral.

The amount of wealth owned by the upper 1 percent of the population – 1 percent, one out of every hundred people –is 40 percent of it all. The 80 percent who are on the bottom own just 7 percent! This is so far from what people actually think the situation is. The video will show you the vast difference between what we believe to be the case, what we think would be the ideal, and what the situation actually is.

I'm a historian. I can tell you that situations like this have existed before in history, and they do not end well for the richest people. Eventually the burden of suffering of the poor becomes too heavy to bear. That's when the pitchforks, the guns, and the torches appear. You think it cannot happen here? Don't kid yourself. This whole country is not far from going tilt over some crisis that comes about because of this disparity.