=Caleb Darr=

When they're young, children are taught to share. We make a cardinal virtue of it. And everyone admires a child who's learned or, better yet, by his or her own nature makes sure that everyone in the group has an equal share of whatever it is: toys, candy, crayons. Oh, if only children ran the world, we wistfully say. Hypocrites that we are.

Can you imagine a children's birthday party where one kid hogs up all the party favors, demands to have all the whacks at the piñata, and grabs the whole cake for himself? Would we look fondly at such a kid and think "Oh, how cute?" Would we want that to be our child? Wouldn't we be embarrassed if it were our kid? Wouldn't we be rather more inclined to think "what a rotten, spoiled little bastard." Wouldn't we justifiably suspect that what we were witnessing were the actings-out of a monster-in-the-making? Wouldn't we look around wondering who this little bully's parents were, waiting for them to step in and correct such misbehavior, and, when they didn't, wonder what could be wrong with them, too? 

Yet this is the very behavior our culture celebrates in the form of those who've amassed vast wealth when others go wanting. We admire those who've best deployed what is essentially the greedy, bullying character of a child who wants everything for himself. 

At what point is the lesson we teach children, the lesson we ourselves were taught as children and apparently grew up to renounce, to share and share alike, no longer valid? At what point do we celebrate, rather than chastise, those who demand the whole cake and leave others with none? At what point does greed become good? 

Perhaps we're duty-bound to teach our children the truth about our cultural values from the start: that they're entitled to take as much cake as they possibly can and fuck everyone else at the party if they aren't clever or strong enough to wrestle away a piece for themselves. After all, if that's the attitude they're expected to have as adults to survive in this world aren't we doing them a  crippling disservice to teach them anything else? Aren't we handicapping them at the very beginning of the rat race by teaching them to be anything less than a pack of voracious bastards, a bunch of vile little cancers soon to be grown to full-blown malignancies for whom nothing less than everything, and not even everything, is ever enough?