Bum Spurns $1 Donation, Tossing it on the Ground

In an op-ed piece in last week’s WSJ, a man who worked on Wall St. said he was walking down the street with four associates when they were accosted by a somewhat disheveled homeless man. “Hey you fat cats!” he said. “You guys got all the money. You’re Wall Street tycoons. Give me some!”

The man explained that he actually didn’t work on Wall Street, but acquiessed, pulling out his wallet. He gave the man a dollar and was stunned at the reaction. “A dollar!” said the man. “That’s not enough, I need five!”

With that he threw the bill on the street, as if it was too despicable to even pick up. It was a first. The non-homeless guy had walked down this street hundreds of times, and dozens of times he’d given a dollar to a bum like this and both parties left happy. But not this time.  Maybe this, he thought, is the result of the Occupy Wall Street movements that are still carrying on all over the US. Now the bums want a lot more than just a dollar.

The op-ed writer opined that this must be a result of President Obama’s constant bashing of the rich. He has made speeches casting the ‘private jet owners, rich hedge fund operators, ‘ and others at the top of society as being coddled…and that we should be raising their taxes to help out the middle class.  The writer’s theory was that this type of class warfare, where the president himself divides the country, is as bad as a father showing preference to one child over another at the dinner table.  Presidents, he said, are supposed to be father figures who treat everyone as special, all equal, he’s the unifier in chief.

Every president has faced the frustrating scene of a divided system–and has had to work with reluctant, petulant congresses to get anything passed. But this is the first time such a cleavage has formed, with the guy at the top attacking an entire class of people, clearly favoring one over the other.