The wealth that is handed down from our parents has special meaning to us, has deep roots. In ages past, much of the wealth was invisible and unnoticable, like a good DJ. More recently, those who could handed down large sums of money, to ensure that their offspring could rise to their maximum potential.(1) Emotionally I have felt wounded by the world that has been handed to me, as I saw the environment degrade, and I really personalized this with my father's offhand irreverence-- the way he would blow off sorting trash into recycling. There are people who do that for you, he said. They go through and turn in the bottles, and get the California redemption value. That added social offense to the environmental repercussions. I feel like an old soul, living at the transformational edge (of time and astrology and society), to feel the loss of environmental heritage as a lack of wealth handed down from my ancestors. I feel guilt at the world that I brought K in to.
(1) There is value in having a society that allows for a class of people who are well fed (good nutrition, I mean), who have access to educational resources, hopefully travel, emotional nurturing of course, and basically a healthy life. In the past, these were people like Sir Isaac Newton, right? An individual must first have its basic needs taken care of in order to dream up abstractions and allow the far-out connections to be made. A leisure class. I hear it is a unifying theme that in times of prosperity, every culture so far has had a demographic who uses recreational drugs. In fact, we all live like kings here in the states, so we could envision basically all of our population being of the leisure class, in the sense that we could work 30 hours a week if we reduced our population. (so many tangets: but then we'd have to have to stop waging war-- population/war correlation, the word we do being often service level with a living wage or professional level education and travel based, but again I am not talking utopia, just pointing out a couple of the tangents that spring to mind and clutter (disorganize) my writing.)

If we look at an analogy for what we might have experienced back in our evolution, we can think of the wealth handed down from our parents as our personal lessons-- the ape learning how to get grubs out with a stick. We still have that in action, but we also have this safety net in our society. I sometimes think that the right essentially wants those without family to bail them out, to die off. Only those with wealthy family continue on. But no, we want a fair chance for everyone, and it is true that some who come from poverty are amazing and exceptional people. Can't help but notice I like poor people better than rich. yet I want my daughter to feel rich. (why?) This post was initiated by thinking about why I would want K to feel rich. Richer than me. Partly I want to give her permission to make financial wealth more of a priority than I have. Certainly issues of money play too dominant a role in my life, and having too much money could remove that role.

But on the other hand, a check from my father sits uncashed, not because I don't want the money or because I think it is bad, but because I feel like people will judge me. Judgements of our loved ones serve a purpose. Reacting to judgement can be a fine line, though. I am cashing the check but I told dad to turn off the autopay. He said he would give me a monthly check during winter quarter, which he did not. IT was hard but I made it, and he finally turned on autopay after I made it through the only quarter of 5 credits. I now have 8 cr and can live (almost) on that. I'd love to be relieved of some credit card debt. The conservative right wing approves of family bailouts, right? oh yeah the left may not.