Settling In, 16 Sept 12

Please, I beg you, please can someone help me to understand why the rich are so rich and the poor are so poor, and this is not an issue?

Reading today’s Sunday Paper (which I bought to help me with resources in my classroom as we can’t afford much so I have to be ‘creative’, we don’t even have enough textbooks for each learner), three stories struck me, in the same paper, they go like this: firstly, Crack Down on miners who are striking to get a pay rise due to their dangerous jobs under the earth mining and providing salaries for the people on The Rich List; then an article about employers not wanting to hire people to work because of ‘low levels of business confidence, political uncertainty and global financial turmoil’; and thirdly, an article on The Rich List having had an eight percent growth in wealth, the amounts being in the billions! (If you’re worth less than 66.30 million, then you don’t make the list.)

How is it logical to have those three articles in the same paper?

Do any of the Rich List people have jobs where their lives are on the line? No. They have jobs where they make decisions, decisions that get them salaries in the millions. Are any of The Rich List people looking for jobs? No, in fact some of them have more than one job. In fact, number 77 is connected to no less than 10 companies. Are there people with no jobs? Thousands.

Where I teach we have a feeding scheme because the learners don’t get food at home. We had a raffle to raise funds this month and learners couldn’t contribute the ten Rand (that’s about 80 Pence in British currency) or sell the 5 tickets at two Rand a ticket (less than 20 Pence). In other words, the luxury homes of billionaires are a few kilometers away from people who can’t afford to eat… billions, which they can’t spend in their lifetime, next to people who are crying in gratitude for food provided by strangers…

I don’t understand; how is this ok? I don’t understand; how is this acceptable?

Another article, a German and his pornography star wife bought Cape land for 48 million and spent 4 years building a house, one house, which they are now selling for 300 million… I couldn’t even afford the repayments for a second hand car to get to the school I teach at…

I don’t understand; how is this ok? I don’t understand; how is this acceptable?

Then to pour salt into the open heart surgery wound, king Goodwill Zwelithini of the KwaZuluNatal province in South Africa, spent 2.8 million of our taxpayers money on 40 cows!

The end of my day saw me chatting to a neighbour whose millionaire cousin has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. At least he can afford a more comfortable death than the miners whose lungs are collapsing…