Emails from Hell, part thirteen.

I couldn't wait for the next email. Here it is!!!!!!

{beginning of email}

            “Let me show you something,” Andrew said to me. “Bear but a touch of my hand,” he said, like the Ghost of Christmas Past. Soon I was whirling at a great height, looking over a vastness of miserable humans, or former humans, in Hell—not suffering from flames or torture,  but suffering from the same thing they did on Earth. They were miserably poor people, huddling in rags. On Earth, if you are poor enough long enough, you starve to death; but in Hell, you can stay poor and hungry forever. The constant stream of busy people went around and around their cauldron of misery.

            “This is unbearable,” I said, covering my eyes. “They suffered on Earth; can they not get some relief after they have left the vale of tears?”

            “Poverty is a great burden,” said Karl. “More so for women than men. For them, it is a veil of tears.”

            “Stick to your Groucho jokes,” I told him.

            “But as I said in my book,” continued Karl, “poverty is the inevitable result of capitalism…”

            “It is the inevitable result of practically any economic system except living in small tribes,” said Andrew, “or living in communes the way we Christians did in the early first century.”

            “None of that matters,” I thundered. “They deserve some relief after death.”

            “That is where the Powers that Be would say you are wrong,” said Andrew. “They would say that poverty is the fault of the poverts.”

            “It is sometimes,” said young Stonewall. “My friends and relatives were pretty damn lazy, just drove around in their trucks with Confederate flags all the time. Odd jobs, but not enough to have an economically secure life. It was our fault.”

            “But,” said Andrew, “the Powers that Be would say it is always the fault of the poor. The poor are always lazy. They would say that there has never existed a poor person—not a single one—who was not lazy, or stupid, or evil.”

            “That’s quite a statement,” I said. “I’m almost certain that it is wrong.”

            “But it is Biblical,” said Andrew. “Look it up in the 37^th Psalm. In the original Bible, not the one that the white supremacists rewrote. Verse 25.”

            Philomena grabbed a Bible and read the verse. “I have been young, and now am old; yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken, or his children begging bread.”

            “Pretty clear, if you take it literally,” said Andrew. “No righteous people are poor, therefore no poor people are righteous.”

            “Most poor people do not like begging for bread,” said Philomena. “They do not want a handout. They want justice. They want opportunity. What they want is for bankers to not charge huge interest rates—usury used to be illegal, even in the Bible—which trap them in poverty. They want to work their way out of poverty. They want jobs, not handouts. You know,” she said, “it is bad enough being poor, but the worst part of it is to have rich people sneer at you and tell you to get your lazy ass up and do some work, even when there is no employment available. The rich hated minimum wages and loved investing in robots…” She started to become very emotional until Stonewall touched her shoulder, and she slumped into his arms.

{end of email}