Zooming in on the rich and calculating their skyscraping digits deceives us all into believing that, generally, people are getting richer. But look at your checkbook; absolutely the opposite is true. There's only so much money in the world, and the extravagance of one means the poverty of many.
This unchecked inequity in our economy looks a lot like the situation of four college students (Don, Joan, Meg and Theresa) who pool their money to purchase an eight-slice pizza. If Don takes four slices of pizza, everyone else gets less. Joan doesn't say, "Hey everybody, Don's eating four slices, so I guess there's more pizza for all of us." No, in the wake of Don's ambitious hunger, the three ladies have only a couple options, and each choice means getting less than their share of the pie.
The women can learn to survive on much less than they bargained for because one person took advantage of them. Don may be a selfish, fat lump, but that's no excuse for the ladies to overact out of self-concern or anger.
Meg, inspired by Don's actions, may take four pieces for herself, leaving Joan and Theresa with none. Then Don and Meg can talk about how their sure determination bracketed them in a new stratum of the pizza-eating industry. And those same two "success stories" can schedule workshops and lectures to teach Joan and Theresa about how they, too, can turn two slices into four.
The problem, of course, arrives when Joan and Theresa don't have the two-slice cover charge to gain admission to the workshop. And it's not because those two worked any less or were any lazier than Meg and Don. It's because the now successful, popular couple stole those slices belonging Terry and J.
Megan and Donald ought to be indicted for pizza theft with intent to eat and given a four-hour sentence with a two-slice fine. But in this particular household, those with the most pizza make, break and enforce the rules. So Terry and Joan get pitied, ridiculed and punished by the very people who stole their chance at a decent meal.
Another option comes when Jo, Meg, and T get really upset about Don's over indulgence and petition, protest and proclaim the injustice done them until Donny sees the error of his ways and returns two, or even three, slices of pizza.
This strategy worked for a man named Mahatma Gandhi. Without violence or crime, Gandhi held a mirror up to the filthy face of an over-grown, unjust British Empire. When, at last, the Brits saw the inhumanity of their rule in India, they let Gandhi's people go.
But thousands of Indians (including innocent women and children) were murdered by the English before granted freedom, and Joan, Megan, and Theresa aren't interested in losing blood over pizza. They just want to have a reasonable talk with Don to figure out what went wrong and to get their fair share.
But what if Don ignores their plea in a pepperoni-induced comma of sheer, deaf gluttony? Still, he gets to make the final decision about whether or not the girls get what's theirs. The power is in the hands of the thief.
So what else can the three hungry ladies do? If the situation persists, they may get enraged - not inspired - by Don's unreasonable greed. And one day, after exhausting all other resources, they may fashion the edges of those dried, cardboard pizza skeletons into dangerous weapons.
And then, while Don sleeps soundly with greasy lips and sticky fingers, the women give him one heck of a paper cut right across the throat. And while warm marinara seeps from his neck and his whole body turns white as mozzarella, the once-hungry women secure 2.66 slices of pizza a piece.
The last option is most unfortunate and most telling of our current situation. What if Don, in an effort to conceal his crime, invents a thing called media - billboards, radio, television, Internet…you name it. But he spaces out the public release of his inventions over time so the ladies don't suspect anything. And, because the sounds get clearer and the images get sharper every year, Joan, Meg and Theresa get increasingly fascinated by the latest media and acquire a taste for technological novelty instead of pizza.
Since Don uses his extra pizza to pay for all this new media stuff, he makes sure that two things happen. One, all media programming gets interrupted every few seconds, minutes or hours (again, he doesn't want the others to get suspicious) with advertisements about how great Don is for having so much pizza.
Two, he convinces the women not to eat what little dough they have but to spend it on televisions and radios. Since there's no bread left for the ladies to buy them, Don provides free computers in schools and libraries as a "public service."
But all this stuff just serves as a tool to promote the greatness of someone who can get four slices of pizza instead of two. Then Don closes in for the kill. He turns entire channels and Web sites into self-promoting entities, "All Don, all the time."
He combines the wide variety of radio possibilities into a couple contrived genres and puts the same commercials on each station. And the women keep tuning in because they love TV and radio and Internet.
And Joan, Meg and Theresa now admire - no worship - Don for his sheer ingenuity. And they all start to believe that they too will one day acquire four whole slices of pizza - what a day that will be.
Then, Don invents reality TV. He stops spending pizza on professional actors and invites Meg to act for free. Meg's flattered by the opportunity and thinks that she'll probably get some more pizza out of the deal. But Meg ends up entertaining her friends for free, all the time promoting the chance to be like Don, to have four slices of pizza.
But what the girls don't know is that while they've been distracted with all of the new media, Don's been taking more pizza. Every year, he takes a half a slice more and produces even flashier programming (he introduces cable and video games in the same season!).
Until finally, Don has more pizza than he or entire nations could ever eat, and Joan, Meg and Theresa are left with only the crusts. And though they can barely survive on scraps, the girls believe that, overall, there's more pizza to go around. Because the last time they saw Don on TV, he had eight whole slices of pizza.
In a house where one person could get eight slices of pizza, certainly they will never go hungry
…or so they think.
