Blessed Are The Poor?

The recent season premiere of Mad Men featured the upwardly-mobile Pete Campbell growing increasingly discontent with his life. Somewhere between last year's finale and this year's premiere, Pete has arrived. He has it all, complete with the home in Greenwich, the window office and the hard-earned respect of his mentor-protagonist, Don Draper. 

Nonetheless, when he returns from work, exhausted and discouraged, his wife Trudy consoles him by advising that discontent is really just the fuel for his ambition. Did she get it backwards? Could less really be more? 

It is clear that being rich isn't always a blessing. But what about being poor?

Jesus said, "Blessed are the poor." If I'm honest, I never believed this. Blessed are the poor confounds me. 

"Blessed are the peace-makers," I get it. Heck, I even can get behind, "Blessed are the cheese-makers" as I love cheese and can sort of tolerate Monty Python for the sake of my marriage. 

But, how is it a blessing to be poor? I struggled with this until I read this recent piece from Bloomberg News: 

"Andrew Schiff was sitting in a traffic jam in California this month after giving a speech at an investment conference about gold. He turned off the satellite radio, got out of the car and screamed a profanity.

"I'm not Zen at all, and when I'm freaking out about the situation, where I'm stuck like a rat in a trap on a highway with no way to get out, it's very hard," Schiff, director of marketing for broker-dealer Euro Pacific Capital Inc., said in an interview.

Schiff, 46, is facing another kind of jam this year: Paid a lower bonus, he said the $350,000 he earns, enough to put him in the country's top 1 percent by income, doesn't cover his family's private-school tuition, a Kent, Connecticut, summer rental and the upgrade they would like from their 1,200-square-foot Brooklyn duplex. 

"I feel stuck," Schiff said. "The New York that I wanted to have is still just beyond my reach."

The smaller bonus checks that hit accounts across the financial-services industry this month are making it difficult to maintain the lifestyles that Wall Street workers expect, according to interviews with bankers and their accountants, therapists, advisers and headhunters.”

"People who don't have money don't understand the stress," said Alan Dlugash, a partner at accounting firm Marks Paneth & Shron LLP in New York who specializes in financial planning for the wealthy. "Could you imagine what it's like to say I got three kids in private school, I have to think about pulling them out? How do you do that?" 

Now I get it; there is an addendum to the adage:

  Blessed are the poor...

                        for they have no private school tuition.  

But I wonder about the poor folks in Woonsocket. I guess they are not so blessed, given the recent talk of closing the public schools there in April due to budget shortfalls. 

If that were to happen, I wonder how the “blessed” working-poor in Woonsocket would pay for three months of full-time daycare. 

Some folks here in East Greenwich say, "This is their own fault for not managing their budgets like we do." However, this argument fails to recognize that the tax base in Woonsocket likely couldn't fund the upgrades to our school playing fields in EG.  

Good thing towns like Woonsocket are “blessed” not to have such worries, because they don’t have the sports programming we have in EG. They just don’t understand how stressful it is to have all those fields and great facilities to support. 

I've heard that God works in unexpected ways and through unlikely people.  Thank you Pete Campbell, Andrew Schiff, Alan Dlugash and others for showing me what "Blessed are the poor," means. 

Alan Dlugash summed it up perfectly, "People who don't have money don't understand the stress," and that is why they shall be called blessed!