For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.
- 1 Timothy 6:10
There's a tremendous article on greed and wealth addiction in today's nytimes by Sam Polk - "For the Love of Money." Here is a person making millions of dollars a year in salary and bonuses and who walks away after being offered a salary of 8 million a year.
"Like alcoholics driving drunk, wealth addiction imperils everyone. Wealth addicts are, more than anybody, specifically responsible for the ever widening rift that is tearing apart our once great country. Wealth addicts are responsible for the vast and toxic disparity between the rich and the poor and the annihilation of the middle class."
Interestingly, last week I ordered volume 1 of Taylor Branch's 3-volume series on Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil rights movement. Polk was influenced by these books, and writes:
"I had recently finished Taylor Branch’s three-volume series on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement, and the image of the Freedom Riders stepping out of their bus into an infuriated mob had seared itself into my mind. I’d told myself that if I’d been alive in the ‘60s, I would have been on that bus.
But I was lying to myself."
