Posted by The Happy Tutor
Imagine that you are classically trained to teach the liberal arts, the arts of freedom, including virtue, excellence, and public service to the children of wealth. Imagine that through a stroke of misfortune (having been born into the wrong era) you find yourself living in a Dumpster by night and teaching financial services to Advisors of Wealth in Wealth Bondage by day. Imagine that you are in your liberal arts training like a surgeon whose eye can detect the shape of a cancerous lump beneath the Wealth Holder's complacent face. You are trained to save that life, but you are not invited, equipped, nor legally entitled. Yet you are driven by an ethic of service. Might you not then become a free lance or pro bono surgeon, operating upon unconsenting patients in the dead of night, in the public square, not to hurt them, though the operation is done without benefit of anesthiologists, but to heal? Of course such hit and run triage earns no plaudits, and no money. But as a moral being, I must do what I must do. Anything less would be criminal.
Of course Wealth Bondage - as it appears to consumers - will attract all comers. They will love the rides, the bargains, the return on investment, the buzz and the spin and the brand names and media they can trust. But Wealth Bondage the ever-open free surgical center out in the alley by the Dumpster is another matter. I don't see the wealthy coming here voluntarily, nor have I ever gotten a referral, even from the survivors of the operations where luck prevailed. I am afraid, my work must remain a hole and corner affair. Others may convene the Conversation of Philanthropy. I will loiter outside in the alley to save what can be saved, and lop off what must go. Vanity goes deep, sometimes; so must the blade.
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