you think you’re exempt
world handed on a platter
therefore it’s all yours
” … struck me as a typical sports hero.
I know the type, because I was once one myself, or so the sports pages kept informing me.
You get to the point where you expect people to do whatever you want because they’ve been lucky enough to breathe the same air you breathe.
When you pass by people who are talking, you assume they’re talking about you.
You think you’re exempt from the rules of ordinary conduct, since the world has been handed you on a platter, and therefore it’s all yours.
Money?
There wasn’t much money in football forty years ago, the way there is now, although then, like now, you were likely to take the money mainly to show everybody how wonderful you were.“
From the book A Man in Full by Tom Wolfe (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 1998).
These words are delivered by the Charlie Croker, the main character or Tom Wolfe’s book about the Atlanta Developer in the midst of a financial crisis of his own making.
Mr. Croker got an edge to his start in Atlanta business due to being a star of the Georgia Tech football team and he played those connections into a world of fabulous wealth.
And how did he get there?
You get to the point where you expect people to do whatever you want because they’ve been lucky enough to breathe the same air you breathe.
When you pass by people who are talking, you assume they’re talking about you.
You think you’re exempt from the rules of ordinary conduct, since the world has been handed you on a platter, and therefore it’s all yours.
Any reading of history and you see these people from the get go.
You might say that back in the book of Genesis, Cain, even though when God told Cain, “If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it.”, Cain felt exempt from the rules of ordinary conduct and went his own way.
From the get go.
We should be and I guess for the most part, we are used to these people being in the world.
It happens to sports stars, rich people … presidents.
What also survives from the get is that warning.
If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door.
*Genesis Chapter 4:
No Haiku For You 