Sometimes you see a juxtaposed headline which has the unintentional consequence of telling you everything about the moment in which you live. And today that headline is that Tesla shareholders approved Elon Musk’s $1 Trillion pay package. And on the same page of every newspaper in the world that holds that headline is another headline that the courts are trying to force Donald Trump to continue to pay for food stamps for the poorest and most underprivileged Black, white, brown, male, female people in our country, our neighbors.
A couple of years ago, I was at the supermarket, and the woman in front of me, with a shopping cart full of food, marked down manager special items, was fumbling through her purse trying to pay for the purchase. And she tried a couple of debit cards, looked to see if she had any cash. To make up for the fact that she was over the limit on everything. And then, quite literally, with a tear on her cheek, pushed the cart to the side and said, “I can’t pay for this food.” And she was shabbily dressed, and I was standing there with my cart loaded, credit cards in my wallet that work. I’m not rich. I’m a working writer. But I had the money to pay for my food. And so I did what I bet 90% of the human beings watching this would have done in that sequence of events.
Before I even thought about it, I stepped forward and I think her bill was something like $38. Wasn’t a huge amount. Just enough food for a day or two. And I said, I’ll take care of that. And... I didn’t feel any special virtue. In fact, it was selfish because I knew that when I went home with my shopping cart and the food that it had held, or rather into the parking lot with my shopping cart, and started putting it into the trunk of my car, I would feel literally sick thinking about that woman walking out with no food. This is no big deal, and I’m certainly not telling this story. To try to look like some sort of paragon of virtuousness. I am as selfish as anybody else. I care about myself and my family and my work first and foremost, as we all do. Because we are primates, we evolved as tribal members.
But on the other hand, I also believe in caring for the people around me. On some rudimentary, basic level. Like you. I will help somebody across a crosswalk who’s on a pair of crutches having broken their foot, like my wife Genie did the other day, stumbling down a staircase. I’m 73, she’s 74. Luckily, we’re in good health. But the two people she was with, two young men, friends of mine, actually, my producer Ernie Gregg and his husband Rock, who’s a pastor, didn’t pause and discuss whether they would help her stand up and bring her home, where I took her to urgent care to get a cast on her foot. They didn’t have to be our friends to do that. They would have done that for a stranger.
Not because they’re particularly virtuous, but, and now here’s what I want to talk about, because they are not unusually cruel people, unlike the rest of us. It’s interesting that Elon Musk is getting a one trillion pay package. This is the same man that, through Neuralink, funded tens of millions of dollars worth of animal research that many ethicists, such as my friend Jessica Pierce, who writes on the ethics of animal experimentation, or my friend Melanie, who’s just written this wonderful book called Lab Dog, about rescuing a dog from a lab. Yes, that happens too. Protest against. And these wonderful primates were experimented on and killed by the hundreds so that this research could proceed.
And Elon Musk has had a dozen or more children by six or so different women, many of which have been tested for in vitro fertilization, not because these women were not fertile, but because his idea of perfection is to test for imperfect children and make sure you’re having designer babies. And it’s no coincidence that on that same page, a president is being ordered to pay for food stamps for the least fortunate human beings. Because to take that checkout line experience I had and enlarge it, It would be as if a billionaire is standing there like Elon Musk or like Donald Trump, who, by the way, was not a billionaire before he became president, but is now because of his Bitcoin sales and all the rest of this, getting money from the kind of people who are donating to build his gold-encrusted ballroom at the time we take food stamps away from people.
It would be as if that person was in a checkout line. Not that that would ever happen with all the layers of servants that these folks have. But reach forward and not only would not pay for what was in that woman’s shopping cart, but took what little she had, snatched her purse, ran off with it, said, hey, I’m taking what little you have to add to the great amount I have. Like some sort of parable of the Good Samaritan reverse. The Samaritan comes down the road, finds the injured person lying there, goes through his pockets, takes what little remains. That wasn’t already stolen by the people who beat and robbed him and then runs off. Now, what I want to discuss here is the cruelty involved in our moment of time.
I know we talk about politics, MAGA versus Democrat, left versus right. But let’s stop for a minute and just talk about the subject of cruelty. We are living in a country where no one blinks at a headline that says one man gets a trillion dollar pay package. A man who’s funded a lot of animal experimentation on harmless creatures locked in stainless steel cages and killed so that we humans can benefit. That’s a different discussion. But I don’t think anyone doubts that that’s a cruel process, that we feel sorry for lab dogs. Locked away who can’t even walk because their muscles are so atrophied. They’ve never been out to play. Their vocal cords are often cut so that they can be experimented on and the experimenter scientists at our great prestigious universities don’t have to listen to them crying and barking.
Huge centers that breed different kinds of rhesus monkeys and others for experimentation where the young monkey is ripped away from the mother to be sent off. To have blood drained from its body continuously in an ongoing experimentation on, say, the chemistry of drugs that help with various blood diseases. We live in a cruel moment. We live in a moment when the American zeitgeist is to tell me standing in that checkout line that somehow this woman who can’t pay for her groceries, it’s her fault somehow, and that somehow I’m in a meritocracy that means that I deserve my privilege. And of course I don’t, because if you’re like me, you have to admit, as by the way I talk about in my new book, The Gospel of Zip, a canine human love story exploring why most dogs and a few humans live joyful lives.
And one of the things I say in this book, which by the way is available for free, so I’m not trying to make a buck here. If you just go to YouTube or to thegospelofzip.com, you can watch the whole book, all seven and a half or eight hours of it that I read aloud for free, because I want to give it away, especially to people who don’t read anymore. That’s also why it’s in very short text-like sections. But one of the big themes of The Gospel of Zip, in fact, the big theme of that book, if you want to look for various threads that run through it, that I write as a 73-year-old grandfather of five grandchildren and the father of three children and the husband of Genie, who has loved her for 56 years after getting her pregnant when we were 17 and 18.
Boy, you would have not bet that that marriage would work out, would you? But one of the lines that runs through my book is, the people who have helped Genie and I, helped me. Work through some mental health problems of depression and anger, help Genie sustain our marriage in spite of the fact that, as I put in the book at the beginning, that I was kind of groomed to be an asshole by divine right. Why by divine right? Because my theological background said that men should be in charge and discipline and rule the world. And that Genie had to fit in with that somehow. Well, I learned a very different lesson, but I learned it from life itself. And one of the humbling things in life is that we don’t do things by ourselves.
Putting people on Mars or building a rocket ship or building a huge gilded ballroom that looks like something some Saudi prince would build where the East Wing used to be. Or getting a billion dollar pay package or selling presidential bitcoins. You know, for instance, with. A man who used to be Prince Andrew, who now is just Andrew, stripped of his titles because of his horrible connection with the pedophile and abuser Jeffrey Epstein. When you think of that kind of idea of what privilege gives men in preying on women, that is part of the cruelty of our time. You know, you can look at that, you can look at him as a sex offender, which indeed he was. But you can also look at it as a pattern of cruelty that has nothing to do with sex differences or gender or rape, but has to do with cruelty.
The real argument against rape or a stronger male beating a woman, or for that matter, an executive woman in power somewhere, firing people just so she can make more money, hey, this cuts in all directions. Or for paying for food stamps for children or giving adequate leave to males and females in situations where they’ve just had a child. The argument for that basically is something very basic. It has nothing to do with the law. It has nothing to do with feminism. It has nothing to do with male dominance or the ‘manosphere’. Those are all side issues. The real fundamental question that we all have to ask ourselves and that my book, The Gospel of Zip, is about, and I hope you listen to it and watch it for free on YouTube or buy it on Amazon if you want to read it on a page, the way I mostly like to read books, or on Kindle, wherever. But the real argument that runs through it, it’s an anti-cruelty book. And I write from the position of a grandfather whose greatest pleasure in life is not writing books. Or making commentary videos, but taking care of my grandchildren, three of whom live very nearby that I cook for several times a week that I go pick up at school.
One of the greatest compliments I’ve ever been paid that I talk about in the book is not in the realm of career or anything fancy. It’s that one of my granddaughters one time told me when she got in the car for a 45 minute drive home that I’d picked her up at high school because she wasn’t feeling well. And she said, you know, mom said, since you’ve already driven down to this, to our school three times today, for her siblings, by the way, who also happened to be there to bring them something, to watch something, to do something. She warned me and said, you might not come get me. But then she looked at me in that sort of teen way and said, and I told her, of course, Ba, because my kids called me B-A, sort of a nickname that stuck, of course, Ba will come. To me, that was a great compliment because it meant that this 17-year-old young woman who I had cradled in my arms, by the way, in this very room walking around listening to music, you can get tennis elbow from holding a child in one position for an hour while they have their nap and become a hero to her mom, by the way, who could also take a nap then when she was a newborn baby or a toddler. But anyway, this same child has grown up into a 17-year-old who expects me to be there. The woman in the supermarket didn’t wake up that morning and expect me to be there. But the reason I was there for her and I’d never seen her since, and it had nothing to do with her being a woman or older or younger or anything, it would have done the same for anybody, was that she ran into someone whose basic grandfatherly view of the world is don’t be cruel. And, you know, when you look at the government shutdown and the flights that are being canceled, it isn’t the billionaires who all have their jets.
Elon Musk is not going to miss a trip or wait in a security checkout line or anything else. Donald Trump isn’t going to have to walk longer across the lawn to get in Marine One, the helicopter to get him to Air Force One. That will soon be refurbished as an even bigger plane given to him by a government trying to gain favor with this man who likes to profit from being president, profit monetarily. They’re not going to miss a beat, but you will. Ordinary Americans, whether you voted for him or not or wear a red MAGA cap or not, Your life will be very inconvenienced and hurt in and around the Thanksgiving season as you try to get back to your family. And the flights cancel because air traffic controllers are being sent home.
Because Democrats and Republicans are cruel, and they don’t put the interests of that woman in the checkout line first. Her food stamps are gone now. She was trying to actually buy with food stamps and she had bought a couple extra things but she didn’t have the money to buy them and that’s why she couldn’t pay. I found that out in the parking lot when she talked to me a little bit. It wasn’t anything to do with Trump. This is a couple years ago. But now she won’t bother coming to the grocery store at all. I hope our local food bank can help her. So think about that, please. Think about the fact that I interpret my being a grandfather as a stand against cruelty. I interpret being a father a stand against cruelty.
I interpret the fact that I went to therapy and tried to change from this asshole by divine right into a husband that gets up in the morning, and I know this will sound a little maudlin and smarmy and as if I’m making this up, but part of what I’ve tried to do and that’s really helped me is to get up and say, how can I give Genie one of the best days of her life today? What can I do? And it isn’t big deals. It’s the equivalent of paying for a cart of groceries. It’s getting up, interrupting my writing that I’ve been doing, to go in and empty the dishwasher. She had a heart attack a couple years ago. Change our diet. I do the cooking. I do a roast vegetable platter for her twice a week that she loves. It’s olive oil and very little salt. And I make it taste tangy without the salt because I use lemon juice. What’s that have to do with not being cruel? Well, you know, the way we say I love you to people is by finding ways to give them joy. Forget happiness. Life is a struggle. Being cool is a struggle. Trying to do meaningful things is a struggle. But we can all not be cruel. And if one of the rules of your life is to not be cruel, then it will come out in ways that mean that someone will say, of course you will come and get them. And drive 45 minutes in each direction again for the third time that day because they count on you. She suffers from some migraines sometimes. Of course I will go.
And the reward is we talk all the way back and she tells me everything she’s doing in her life. It’s my reward for being counted on. I’m a person of substance to my grandchildren. But that substance is built on a lack of cruelty. If you weigh up every decision you make in your life based on the fact that it’s a statement against cruelty, of course we will pay for food stamps for the hungry. Of course it’s obscene to get a $1 billion pay package, and it’s even more obscene to get a $1 trillion pay package. It’s needless and silly. Of course we will find alternatives to experimenting on... our fellow brother and sister animals on this planet, the great apes and the monkeys and the lab dogs with their vocal cords trimmed so we don’t have to listen to them bark while we experiment on them.
If our guide is to avoid cruelty, do you know everything else falls into place in marriage and childcare and government policy? And I appeal to those in the government. And who are in power over us, the tech bros and the others with their algorithms that try to pit each one of us against the other by making us do the clickbait routine.
I appeal to everybody, stop for a minute, take a deep breath.
Don’t be cruel.
