Dear Editor:
No Christmas season is complete without innumerable references to Charles Dickens's famous novel A Christmas Carol. The world hungers for the warm, satisfying story of a greedy, unfeeling old tycoon undergoing a change of heart and, among other nice things, saving the life of a crippled waif.
Heartless misers are labelled Scrooges, downtrodden employees are Bob Cratchits, and needy little kids are Tiny Tims.
But it all comes right in the end. We must believe that, or it isn't warm and satisfying at all.
I have to wonder how the story would fare if it were introduced in today's world, when the gap between rich and poor is even wider than it was when Dickens wrote. There are no debtors' prisons, but millions are prisoners of a terrible poverty in which hundreds of children die every day through famine, disease and war, while merchant princes around the world spend billions on themselves and their golden monuments.
To the ruling elite, the story's ending with Scrooge abandoning his merciless way of piling up gold must be sad indeed. His continued success as a lender and stock market manipulator must be inspiring to many a CEO or independent businessman - and then, horrors, Scrooge is cowed by a series of ghosts into overpaying his workforce and investing money in a handicapped and economically worthless child.
Search as we might for real examples of tycoons voluntarily helping the poor (except as a tax dodge), they are thin on the ground. For every Bill Gates, there a thousand Trumps, and it would take a lot more than a chain-rattling ghost to convince this army of avarice that there is merit in sharing your money with the poor.
One of the favourite maxims of the successful capitalist says that if a person is not a socialist in his youth he has no heart, but if he is still a socialist as he matures, he has no brain. That's just a glib way of saying that it's stupid to concern yourself with the welfare of others instead of concentrating on building your own wealth.
Get real. Get up to date. Tiny Tim is dead. Merry Christmas.
Tony Eberts, New Westminster
