Fairness?

     It was a discussion in the locker room of the Y the other day.  Someone was talking about how it was not fair that so many people did not have to pay any income tax. The complaint was that there were so many great wealthy companies that did not pay and about 40% (he said) of our citizens did not pay any taxes.  He was feeling mistreated and overburdened. It is not fair. It is not fair he kept saying.
   
      I told him that I have long ago abandoned any passion for life to be fair. It was not something that I wanted to argue for and was not something that I hoped ever happened.  I did not want life to be fair from the purely selfish reason that I would have to give up way to much of what I have.

     I had just read a piece that one of the Hollywood directors was going to join an effort to demonstrate the world's poverty by trying to live 5 days on $1.50.  $1.50 is said to be what 1.4 billion people around the world live on a day.  So if life is going to be fair, then they have to be give a little more than that for them to get up to my level or I am going to have to give up a lot of my bounty to even things out fairly.

      I really do think that God loves the whole world and we in the United States or America were not intended to take for ourselves all of the resources of other countries and bless ourselves with them.  I do believe that as disciples of Jesus we really do need to start looking at how we can live with less and share more with other people and other countries.  Taxes are just one thing that is not fair, and I pay what Quicken tells me I owe, but if life is going to be fair, then I have to give out and give up a whole lot more.

     The person I was talking with was not happy to look at life from this perspective.  It was not what he wanted to hear.  Then again lots of things that Jesus said about care for the needy, the children and the widows are not heard gladly either.