alternet | Rich people rarely tell you how they really feel about poor people.
Occasionally, though, you get a glimpse. Earlier this week, the
Washington Post published a storyabout
Rancho Santa Fe, a small but extremely wealthy enclave in Southern
California. Like the rest of California, the people of Rancho Santa Fe
are dealing with a drought. As you might imagine, that means water is
scarce and conservation is critical. For the denizens of Rancho Santa
Fe, however, conservation is someone else’s problem, namely poor people.
According
to Steve Yuhas, who lives in the area and hosts a conservative
talk-radio show, privileged people “should not be forced to live on
property with brown lawns, golf on brown courses or apologize for
wanting their gardens to be beautiful.” Oh, the humanity! In case it
wasn’t clear, Yuhas added that the right to water ought to scale with
income: “No, we’re not all equal when it comes to water.”
And Yuhas
isn’t alone. Gay Butler, an avid equestrian and fellow resident of
Rancho Santa Fe, fumed for similar reasons. “It angers me because people
aren’t looking at the overall picture,” she said. “What are we supposed
to do, just have dirt around our house on four acres?” Perhaps Butler
has a point. It’s one thing to demand sacrifice in extraordinary
circumstances, but we’ve got to draw the line somewhere, right? If a
woman wants to ride her finely manicured horse on a dirt-free prairie in
the middle of the desert, what matters a little drought?
Brett
Barbre, a fellow Orange Country aristocrat, also appears to get it. “I
call it the war on suburbia,” he remarked. “California used to be the
land of opportunity and freedom. It’s slowly becoming the land of one
group telling everyone else how they think everybody should live their
lives.” Barbre continued: “They’ll have to pry it [his water hose] from
my cold, dead hands.”
You may be asking yourself: Do restrictions
on water consumption during a historic drought really constitute an
all-out assault on human freedom? Fair question. Most of us fail to see
this issue in such grand terms. Maybe we’re missing something. Mr.
Barbre is either a bold lover of liberty or a detached plutocrat with a
penchant for hyperbole. You be the judge.
In any case, I see the
decadence of the people in Rancho Santa Fe as a microcosm of America
today, particularly corporate America. What these people exhibit, apart
from their smugness, is a complete absence of any sense of collective
responsibility. They can’t see and aren’t interested in the consequences
of their actions. And they can’t muster a modicum of moderation in the
face of enormous scarcity. Every resource, every privilege, is theirs to
pilfer with impunity. These people are prepared to endanger an entire
ecosystem simply to avoid the indignity of brown golf courses; this is
what true entitlement looks like.
