Writers appreciate their blessings, but want justice for all

Editor:

In our calling out the greed of health insurance CEO’s earning $102 million per year (that’s not a million, but 100+ times as much), department chain owners making $34 billion annually between 6 of them, and paying most of their 1.1 million workers so little that they need food stamps and Medicaid, and watching the rich not pay their share of taxes, nor paying their bills, cheating and endangering small businesses that sub-contract with them, we don’t like being dismissed as being jealous.

Nope, we are not jealous at all of their often corrupting riches and power.

How corrupt are they? According to noted criminologists, Sutherland, Cressy and Luckenbill, who wrote about crime and “White Collar Crime” as late as the 1990’s, over 70% of large firms had committed at least 5 felonies.

So, how many have committed three? One drug company has been fined hundreds of thousands 9 times and over, a billion another time. What happened to “three strikes and you’re out” – life-time imprisonment? Oh that’s for us common men, not for the rich.

Again, we’re not jealous. We’re most thankful to God for what we have.

Instead, as Christ said, it’s a matter of “Hungering and thirsting for Justice.”

As a family, we’re very thankful for what we have and have had: three wonderful children and their wives, 6 wonderful grandchildren, great families and friends, to have 61 years of delightful marriage and God’s nature with glens and groves and crystal lakes to delight in.

We’re thankful for the chances to do work we believed in. Margaret taught and counseled in the prisons, and in public health and mental health nursing, working with chronically mentally ill.

Bob worked in Probation, working with many struggling and abused people, poor and minorities, with the interrelated problems of alcoholism, mental illness, chronic health, domestic violence and racism and sexism in the fields of health and criminal justice.

We were involved together in our church and the community, diocese and state, dealing with many of these same issues. In our professional work and involvement in the church and the community, we had the blessings of many colleagues, who shared the same concerns and zeal.

We had many adventures with extended family and friends, trips, holiday get-togethers, wonderful conversation and the food, fantastic food, and most of all warm companionship. We’ve had and still have wonderful adventures in music and Jazz, seeing nearly all the greats, including Satchmo, Ellington, Miles,  Benny Goodman, Nat “King” Cole, McCoy Tyner and Dave Brubeck many times and now the young lions.

We’ve had the pleasure of bringing such thrilling music to others through the Genesee-Orleans Jazz Festival and weekly radio shows on Rochester’s Jazz 90.1 FM.

That our criticisms of the greedy would be dismissed as jealousy, is proof that they don’t understand “Justice”, don’t understand Christ, don’t understand loving their neighbor, can’t imagine anyone being  eternally thankful with what we have and do.

They only understand their own pursuit of more and more and more at the frequently cruel and sometimes deadly expense of others.

Lord, thank you for all that we have. Help others (and us) to be thankful and do their part to achieve justice. As Pope Paul VI, considered a conservative, said, “We can’t have peace without justice,” and further observed, “We wouldn’t need charity, if we had justice.”

Bob and Margaret Golden

Waterport