Feeling rich?

Making rich people feel guilty for being rich annoys me. And Americans' addiction to feeling guilty for being rich annoys me even more. Know why? It assigns blame where there isn't necessarily blame and avoids assigning responsibility where responsibility should be stressed.

The thing about awareness is that in the "Information Age" you have to be of sub-average intelligence NOT to be aware that Americans are rich compared to the rest of the world (or that AIDS is a global problem, or that poverty has not been eradicated, etc.). If you know how to use the internet and watch TV and aren't completely self-absorbed, you have to work pretty hard not to know these things.

And from what I've seen in my generation there is this obsession with KNOWING, and, as I mentioned, an addiction to feeling guilty. We see a tiny bit of what the rest of the world is like and we feel guilty for being Westerners. So we have to do penance. We need to know and repeat the statistic that Americans spend more annually on ice cream than some countries' GDP, so that we can feel fat and ridiculously extravagant. But we either stop buying ice cream, which doesn't do anybody much good, or we keep buying ice cream anyway, which doesn't do anybody much good and makes us even fatter.

Enter Global Rich List, here to help subsidize our addiction. Enter your yearly salary in the currency of choice and find that if you make an average college student income (about $5000) you're in the top 14% of the world; if you make the average American income, you're in the top 3%. Come one, come all.

Wouldn't it be nice if instead of gathering round the computer screen to feel rich - to feel simultaneously blessed and guilty - we took our oodles of wealth and started to bless others? I think the real reason we feel guilty about being rich is that we weren't meant to be comfortable with sitting on our blessings. If we are called God's people, his blessings to us should quiver in our hands and tremble in our pockets with anticipation. We should be unable to wait to start blessings others with it.

Nobody asked us if we wanted to be rich Americans. And nobody asked us if we wanted the responsibility to bless others. And we certainly didn't ask for those things ourselves. But those are precisely the privileges that God has given us.