The Bigotry of Powerlessness

Hank writes his Notes From The Cube . . .

I came across this scribbled on a whiteboard in Conference Room C (the small one that no one hardly uses):

THE BIGOTRY OF POWERLESSNESS

It hit home. We in the cubes don't have power. The workers in the factory certainly don't have power. I am guessing that most of the management doesn't have power, either, not really. (It's probably even more apparent to someone who has a title to realize that he or she has very little influence over how things are run.)

And that results in a bigotry - unconscious? conscious? - against everyone else we perceive as "less" powerful than ourselves, who (if they advance) threaten what little power we (think) we have.

Someone in a bad prize-winning book I just read said the only thing worthwhile in that excruciating literary experience: Suffering doesn't make you more charitable to your fellow sufferers. 'Same thing with power - or powerlessness.

Most of the time it's a numb feeling, though, like a scratch that's scabbed over. When we pick at it, that's when it hurts and the bigotry seeps out.

You see it all the time in elections. Someone else wrote somewhere (I'm just full of misremembered allusions) words to this effect: Americans don't believe in taxing the rich because they all believe that someday they are going to be rich and they don't want to lose it. So, every time an election rolls around, so many of us vote for the promises made against our own interests - because I am not them, the disadvantaged or the poor or . . . the powerless.

Y'know, I don't even blame those with power. They don't make us what we are. They even suffer - because our petty bigotries result in petty jealousies and petty turf wars and petty bureaucracies (the perfect bastion of fake power) that grind things down to a slow crawl sometimes. Dogs fighting for the same bone, even when there are two or three others sitting by the side.