Quid Pro Quo or “something for something” defines the transactional life. A few examples of this life might be:
- Marrying a man or woman of wealth and inheritance for understood, shared benefits in exchange for producing a competent heir,
- Doing business with an unscrupulous entrepreneur in exchange for a lucrative contract,
- Creating a permanent, bottom class within a society in order to maintain the status quo so as to ensure stability in global markets and to continue the flow of business.
Whether personal, business or governmental, the transactional life defines the American way of life.
Unless your parents, family and community teach you “about that life,” the movies, the bible, and Christianity specifically mirage you into turning the other cheek:
38 “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’[a] 39 But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. 40 And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. “(Matthew 5:38-40).
Slave owners, billionaires, “royalty,” industrialists and generals may mouth these words in a public Easter sermon, however when they sit with their children at dinner that night, these hoarders discuss what really matters to them: the transactional life and how to keep legacy money in the family. Are they wrong for understanding the bait and switch? For having a public-private face? That’s the way of the world of wealth. Bread, bibles and circuses for everyone else.
Reparations must be paid to the descendants of slaves because the debt is owed. The invoice is ready and the receipts are here. The American life is the transactional life. Something has been given: 500 years of slavery, Jim Crow (American Apartheid), redlining, Black laws, railroad and infrastructure unpaid labor, mass incarceration, discrimination enforced through legislation as governmental policy, judicial inequity, and police brutality to name a few. Now something must be paid — $100 Trillion.
Cut the Check