Why Are the Sacrifices of the Rich Valued More Than Those of the Poor? by Dave Conroy
I recently buried my mother and in a day of touching moments one moment stood out for me. I was opening cards and saw one from the mother of a friend containing a $10 bill. This lady is on SSI and has very little money. It is entirely possible that the $10 in that card represented the sum total of her free money for the week or even the month. The idea that this woman gave up what for her was such a large amount of money really, deeply touched me. Yet, if Bill Gates had a program where he gave random grieving familiies $10,000, it would be he that most people would have remarked on. Why is that? By any measure that modest amount given by the lady who gave us that card would be vastly more of a sacrifice for her than the $10,000 would have been for Bill Gates.
Last Thursday provided another example of this phenomena. Pat Tillman, a safety for the Arizona Cardinals who turned down a $3.5 million contract, was killed in Afghanistan. By the count of this site
http://lunaville.org/OEF/default.aspx he was the 187th US casualty in Afghanistan. Yet I, like most other people, couldn't name a single other person off the top of my head who perished there. Why is that? After all, many of them had families. All of them had chosen to enlist. And some of them had chosen to do so after September 11th. So why do we value Pat Tillman so much more?
In part, it is because people like Pat Tillman have become so rare. It has become all but unthinkable that a rich, handsome young man would voluntarily pass up more money in order to actually serve his nation in a military capacity. Our military is composed largely of the children of our former military, the children of our servants, the children of our laborers, and so on. They are rarely the children of our doctors, our lawyers, or our lawmakers. And they are virtually never the children of our professional athletes. I remember the case of an Annapolis grad named Robinson who got drafted into the NBA. He was permitted, unlike any other person, to 'serve' his remaining service years in the NBA. The person who let this happen was Secretary of the Navy Lehman who is now on the September 11 Commission.
This wasn't always the case. For much of our history the rich were expected to serve in our military. There was a whole theory, called noblesse oblige, that insured that very thing. Roughly translated it means "From those to whom much is given, much is expected. A young Princess Elizabeth, roughly the same age as the Bush twins, served as a nurse in WWII. Joe Kennedy, nearly the wealthiest man in the country, had two sons serve in WWII, lost one, and nearly lost the other. Ted Williams, Joe Dimagio, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, and Elvis all served in the military. Abe Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt both had sons in the wars they led. For much of our history, the idea of a rich class that refused to serve in the military was as unthinkable as the idea of Pat Tillman doing so now.
I don't discount the sacrifice of the Tillman family. His death is both noble and tragic. And to the extent that Bush's adventure in Iraq diverted troops from Afghanistan, possibly preventable. His family deserves our respect, our honor, and our thanks. But, by any reasonable measure, they are better off, than the vast majority of the other 186 families who lost people in Afghanistan and the close to 700 who lost people in Iraq. Mr. Tillman's family had benefit of his previous years on the NFL and thus a good deal of money. Most of the others who lost a father in Afghanistan or Iraq won't be able to fall back on such wealth. They have already found themselves in a daily grind of grief with the very modest benefits accorded them by our government. They exist in relative anomynity and outside of the thoughts and prayers of all but close friends and family.
I am all for honoring Pat Tillman but what about Sgt. Ryan D. Foraker of Logan Ohio, or any of the other 186 people who preceeded Pat Tillman in death? While we are at it, what about a return to the concept of noblesse oblige? Our new motto seems to be "From those to whom little was given, much is expected". It is sad that our current era brings back a nostalgia for the robber barron era. We have made idols of the idle rich. Which is why Pat Tillman is so worthy of news. He was a man behind the times, and thus has the thanks of a grateful nation. But we shouldn't forget to thank the other 186 in our rush to thank Pat Tillman.
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