Op-ed: Thanksgiving and to have and have not

By Bill Schubart
©2025 Telegraph Publishing LLC

My family’s always favored Thanksgiving over the celestial holidays like Christmas and Easter that feed a bloom of consumption. At Thanksgiving, families and friends simply gather to express gratitude, share food, and tell stories. It’s an earthbound holiday.

There are exceptions. France’s Bernard Arnault (estimated net worth: $184B) recently was quoted saying, “As long as I’m not the richest man in the world, I won’t really be happy.”

Haves and have-nots have lived side-by-side throughout much of humankind’s 300,000-year history, although the concept of cumulative wealth as measured in currency — as opposed to food, fuel and shelter — is only some 5,000 years-old.

The question we’re asking here is how does the person of excessive wealth react when he or she sees a fellow human being struggling to stay alive for lack of food or shelter? Does their intellect come to their defense and suggest to them that the person they see has chosen their own fate by being idle instead of working? Does their head eclipse their heart, absolve them of human emotion, and allow them to simply walk on by?

In exploring the morality of massive wealth, expanding poverty, and mass starvation we will differentiate between “sympathy,” “empathy” and “action.” “Sympathy” is observing and feeling sorry for someone’s adversity. “Empathy” is understanding it intellectually and experiencing it emotionally. “Action” is doing something about it in the moment and committing to changing the conditions that perpetuate it.

I remember when I first took my young children to stay with a cousin in New York City. I could afford neither a hotel nor taxis so we walked a lot. Even in the East 70s, there were street people begging for handouts and I simply “walked on by.” My children scolded me for my lack of caring. I wanted to explain that some of the beggars were smoking cigarettes or asked for money to satisfy addictions. But instead, I went to a bank, bought a roll of quarters and gave them each a handful to distribute as they saw fit. They gave everyone who asked a quarter.

Later, when I lived briefly in New York City working in the music business, I took a different tack. When asked for money to buy food, I said, “Come along and I’ll buy you some food.” More often than not, I got an angry response. On the rare occasion where a street person responded, I would take them to the nearest Blarney Stone, where I could then buy them a steam-table hot meal for $2.99.

Throughout history, humankind has experienced cycles of deep and broad poverty alongside vast accumulations of wealth and power, eventually followed by societal efforts to reform the egregious range of wealth disparities.

The French Revolution at the end of the 18^th century sought to put an end to the absolute power of King Louis XIV, and to his coterie of aristocrats. “The Estate System,” largely exempted French aristocrats from taxation and put most of the tax burden on the Third Estate —  commoners and laborers.

At the turn of the last century, President Theodore Roosevelt introduced the “Square Deal” and the “Sherman Antitrust Act” in a regulatory effort to break up trusts and monopolies and reduce the wealth of the “Robber Barons.” Twenty-five years later, his distant cousin, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, initiated “The New Deal” to specifically protect the interests of an emerging middle-class of American workers and suppress the immense disparity of wealth.

This historical cycle of allowing the concentration of massive wealth and widespread poverty to co-exist and then initiating efforts to reduce the wealth disparity to salvage a middle class of workers and reduce the inhuman impacts of poverty is ongoing today as we watch another record-breaking upswing of wealth accumulation and plutocratic power, a steep projected increase in U.S. poverty, and the shrinking of the working middle-class.

Since 1983, the number of billionaires in the U.S. has grown from 15 to over 800. Ariano Campo-Flores of the Wall Street Journal recently reported that the top .01% of U.S. households held assets worth $23T this year while the bottom 50% held about a quarter of that at $4.2T. Elon Musk made headlines with his successful demand for a 10-year compensation package of $1 trillion paid out at $100B a year.

Humankind generally understands the ethical questions around extreme wealth in the context of the world’s religions. In Christianity, the King James Bible quotes Timothy 6:10, “For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.” Likewise, the Dhammapada (Buddhism), Qur’an (Islam), Bhagavad Gita (Hindu), and Tanakh (Judaism) all proscribe extreme wealth.

But things are never simple. Religion has been used by adherents to justify their extreme wealth and religious themselves institutions have amassed huge wealth. How does the Catholic Church justify its estimated net worth of $73B when, at its core, its mission is feeding the poor and sheltering the homeless? How much would the sale of its assets and real estate do to stem the impacts of world poverty?

What are the government tools available to us to counter these vast disparities of wealth? The concept of a wealth tax has resurfaced and is again under debate, even as the billionaire class of plutocrats exert their political power to prevent or elude such a tax. In her 1885 novel, Mrs. Dymond, Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie wrote “if you give a man a fish, he is hungry again in an hour. If you teach him to catch a fish you do him a good turn”… a good beginning. But if you then create a socio-economic environment where one can work and thrive by supporting unionization, a progressive income tax as we had in the Eisenhower era or a tax on extreme assets, that fisherman might become a commercial fisherman or a fishmonger, and earn a livable wage.

A recent book by Chuck Collins, titled Burned by Billionaires, details chapter-by-chapter with supporting data how billionaire plutocrats are destroying the environment, shifting taxes away from themselves to the middle-class, diminishing affordable housing, expanding racial division, profiting from an unaffordable healthcare system and eroding democracy.

We must elect leaders who will amend labor laws to encourage union organization, initiate changes in corporate governance to give workers more of a stake in their own employment, nullify Citizens United to return voice and power to average citizens themselves instead of plutocratic billionaires. We must be willing to pay taxes when they support the common good, invest in affordable public housing and raise the unconscionable federal minimum wage from $7.25/hour ($15,000/year). The MIT Livable Wage Calculator sets $40.48 per hour for a working couple in Burlington, Vt., with two children — six times federal minimum wage and almost three times Vermont’s current minimum wage of $14.01.

Although I foreswore my childhood Catholic faith when I was 18, I maintained a deep relationship with the priest under whom I served as an altar boy as a child in Morrisville. As an adult, I would regularly invite him out for lunch and we remained dear friends until he died at 85. I’d pick him up at his retirement home and take him to lunch, where we’d return to one of our many conversational threads. On our next-to-last visit, I asked him a question I’d been struggling with for much of my life.

“At what point does the accumulation of wealth change from an ethical imperative to earn one’s living, support one’s family and community, and be a positive economic force in society to a mortal sin of greed and excess?”

An enigmatic smile lit up his face as he thought about my question. I continued, “Is it $10 million, $100 million, $1 billion. Can it be expressed in a number?”

In his soft voice, he finally replied: “An extravagance of wealth must be measured against human pain and one’s capacity to alleviate it with one’s own resources. Everyone must answer that question honestly for themselves. There is no number.”

“When does love become jealousy? When does faith become self-serving orthodoxy? When does a war of defense shift to one of aggression?” he continued.

I had my answer. He blessed our meal and we returned quietly to our food.

Bill Schubart is an author who lives in Hinesburg.