YOU CAN NEVER BE TOO RICH OR TOO THIN

"You can never be too rich or too thin...!"

Lets consider this pithy remark for a reflective moment. It can be heard (or certainly thought) in such venues as sports bars, fine eateries and board rooms. Without putting too fine a point on it, it seems to capture some of the bravado of the good life in today's America. There are alternative mantras as well: "You only live once," "Get it while you can," and "The one with the most toys at the end of the game is the winner."

America is hardly the first culture in which the better endowed classes strut their stuff with a certain joie de vivre. Sift the ruins of any great society -- the Egyptians, Persians, Romans, 17th C France -- and you will find evidence of these classes in abundance. But let it be said the operative word here is "ruins," for these cultures and classes did not last forever. Any more than will ours.

While we're reflecting, it's good to sift these ruins for something else that was there. However, unlike the upper class bravado, this something-else is still with us. The under classes.

These are those who go by many names. The poor...the leper...the handicapped...the challenged...the least fit ....and, lately, the drains-on-society. These millions of lives rarely leave anything behind to be featured in museums or posted on the Internet. But still they were there side by side with the upper classes. They too were born, lived, and struggled. However, they are rarely recorded or featured or honored. They just were...

Many debates as to why they were so much less than those with so much more. A twist of nature, an irony of birth, some missing genes, perhaps a tragic event in their formative years. Whatever the reasons, their society (like ours) always dismissed them. At one ignorant time, dismissed them into upper-attics, chained to asylum walls. placed in nameless orphanages, and largely banished from the rest of us. Most certainly from the upper classes for whom "God's failures" presented a distressing image which they sometimes tempered with noblesse oblige while they preached The Gospel of Wealth.

In today's culture we have learned more patience, tolerance, even respect for the least-among-us. There are homes and job centers and even entire communities where "God's failures" can live up to their capacities with honor. Still, ours is a culture of winners! A culture which shines its brightest lights on the rich and the thin and strong and the brave and most especially the beautiful.

There once was a man who we are told strode the hills of Galilee preaching wise things. One of them was: "The meek shall inherit the earth..."