~by Colleen O’Brien
Eighty-year-old Vicki Robin, author of a book that sold more than a million copies worldwide — Your Money or Your Life — about financial management by individuals, based on happiness instead of money: “If you live for having it all, what you have is never enough.”
Who does that sound like?
Celebrated as one of the world’s wealthiest and honored as the most generous of philanthropists, thoughtful humanitarian Warren Buffett, in 2006, announced that he would give away his entire accumulation of wealth to charity. By 2017, he had unloaded $28 billion. “The real measure of your wealth is how much you’d be worth if you lost all your money.”
If only our remaining 988 (Forbes) billionaires knew what to do with their riches, the world would have no reason . . . except for the occasional dimwit . . . to be at war.
Albert Einstein, considered one of the world’s most brilliant and creative minds and loved because of his wit when being interviewed, said, “Try not to become a man of success but rather, try to become a man of value.”
Of what value is our current president?
H.L. Hunt, a Texas oil tycoon mid-20th-century, was politically active in his opposition to Social Security, unemployment insurance and labor laws; he also was a supporter of white supremacist George Wallace in his 1965 bid for governor of Alabama. Hunt wrote in one of his daily syndicated newspaper columns, “Money is just a way of keeping score.”
This rings true of Trump and his crony billionaires and answers our question: Why on earth does anyone need that much money?” Oh, becoming a billionaire, however one manages to do so, is merely a game of one-upmanship, no matter who gets hurt.
Our most erudite, witty and quoted forefather, Benjamin Franklin, had a lot to say about our president!
“Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame.” A war for oil, for example?
“Money never made a man happy yet, nor will it. The more a man has, the more he wants. Instead of filling a vacuum, it makes one.”
“He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else.” He who blames everything on Biden and Obama fits this quote.
“Pardoning the Bad is injuring the Good.” If this isn’t just made for our pardon-happy president, Mr. Franklin!
“Freedom of speech is a principal pillar of a free government; when this support is taken away, the constitution of a free society is dissolved, and tyranny is erected on its ruins.” (The Pennsylvania Gazette, 1737 – written 289 years ago, 39 years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence)
This Franklin quote might help us now by being repeated constantly, for Trump as president has diminished freedom of speech by castigating and lying about comedians who roast him; he can’t take a joke or make a joke, although he is a mean joke as he strikes out against anyone who does the opposite of praising him. He convinces media bosses to fire the comics and edit out the truth that reporters have researched and written for publication; as well as forces one comedic talk show host — Rosie O‘Donnell — to move to Ireland to protect her sanity and find a safe place to rear her youngest child away from a bully.
Lucius Seneca (4 BC to AD 65) was a philosophical statesman in Rome and advisor to Emperor Nero (who is said to have let Rome burn while he played his fiddle). Nero is back in the news being compared to Trump (emperor in his own mind), said to be demolishing a democracy while he plays his golf. Seneca, in his philosophical persona, penned, “It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more that is poor.”
I don’t know if Seneca was writing of Nero or was perspicacious, having a keen mental vision and discernment in foreseeing . . . a 21st-century Nero.
