Baking Your Pie

Baking Your Pie-an Allegory
Copyright 2010 Margot Potter
A Liberal Independent Political Rant brought to you by Self Righteous Indignation Flakes-the cereal for people with something to get off of their chest.

There is a pie you make. The pie is reflective of the level of your prosperity. You work, you make a lot of money, you buy the ingredients, you bake the pie.

It's your pie, right?

Well, yes...but here's the other side of the coin. A lot of people had to work for not a lot of money to make the ingredients and get them to a store so you could buy them and make that pie.

Someone grew and harvested the wheat. Someone made it into flour.

Someone tended and milked the cows that made the butter. Someone processed the milk and made the butter.

Someone stood in the hot sun and picked the fruit.

Someone stood in a sugar cane field and chopped down the canes. Someone processed that into sugar.

Someone drove the truck to the grocery store. Someone stocked the shelves. Someone rung you out on the register and bagged your ingredients.

Someone clung to the back of a stench filled garbage truck and took away the detritus of your pie baking.

And on and on and on, every ingredient in that pie was available to you because someone else worked hard and got paid very little. Not everyone has the opportunity, faculties or ability to make lots of money to buy lots of ingredients to make a big pie. That's because someone has to do the dirty work so someone else can drive to the happy grocery store, buy their tasty ingredients, head back to their state of the art kitchen and bake their fabulous pie. Not everyone gets to go to college or have a stable family life or grow up in suburbia or make the right connections or advance into big money jobs, because if we all did that...who would do the dirty work and who would we blame for taking all of our pie? Because we certainly can't blame the giant corporations and their CEOs that make the majority of money on the ingredients, lobby and fund politicians to ensure their interests are protected and move their business offices to offshore accounts so they don't have to pay any taxes. No, we can't blame them.

So...if you're not going to get angry at the corporate pie pillaging and are instead going to blame the pie ingredient makers for your woes, then it's time to think about this pie of yours. Is it really completely your pie or do you, perhaps, owe just a little slice to help the people who made the ingredients have access to basic things like school, health care, police protection... I'm not saying you need to give your entire pie away, just a slice, mind you.

A society is measured by the way it treats the least among us. I don't advocate giving all of your pie money to people who don't want to work, that's just silly. I think we should all get to have a nice juicy pie of our own making when we want one. I work for myself, so I give a lot of my pie money, much more than most people. I advocate that the corporations and the big wigs and the folks who make a huge amount of the pie money at the very least pay the same percentage of their income that the folks who make the pie ingredients have to pay. It's only fair.

I think if you want to bake pies and not worry about giving any crumbs to the people who make the ingredients for you, perhaps you can get together with the other 1% of fancy pie bakers and purchase a country where you can all live together. Then those pesky pie ingredients people will stop taking all of your pie money.

Love
Madge (a registered Independent, for the record.)