A reflection by: MARK GATES
This past Spring, I joined a writing club here in town. Hoping to learn to express my faith & myself, more clearly in this secular world. Our most recent assignment was to write about “Margins”. Feeling that this would go excruciatingly political, I wasn’t going to write. But in the middle of the night the Holy Spirit came to me, and reminded me, of God’s gift to me… ‘The sword of Holy Boldness’.
***Who will speak the truth if not me? Who will defend the defenseless if not me? If not Now… WHEN?? Listening to my Lady Wisdom, I arose, to write. Within two hours I constructed what would eventually be, the following essay. Please remember… I write what I “Feel”. On a good day, I hope to make you ‘feel’ also. Praise God.
Theme: Margins Title: LESS THAN.! Mark Gates 7-15-26
My own experience with ‘Margins’ came as an 18- 19-year old apprentice meatcutter in my first real job as an adult. Every month the Department managers would take an inventory of products. The results were then compared to the previous month’s sales, expenses, rival stores and etc.! This would create a ‘Profit Margin’. It was explained to me that afterward, all of the 100 stores were listed, best down to least, according to their percentage. The middle point, (#50), was the arbitrarily assigned, and dreaded, margin threshold. **Above the line was profitable (Black), and below the line was Not profitable (Red). The manager teaching me this said, “It’s not that numbers 44-49 out of that 100 were losing money, NO! They just didn’t meet the ‘standards’. They were “LESS THAN”! An arbitrary margin with the power to create a group of, “Less Thans”.
‘Margins’ are what caused the Great Depression. Financial margins that were both arbitrary and extremely, cruelly, crushingly real. If you lived during the Great Depression, you lived on the lower margin of society, of humanity really. The only people doing well during this era were the criminals: The bootleggers & The politicians. Everyone else… You were a “LESS THAN”.
Should you live to see the end of the depression, you would still live on the ‘Margins’. You might have thought at that time that the chasm between the haves and the have-nots could not humanly, possibly get any wider. But what of those who did not live to see that day? You see the key word, to that chasm, is “Thought”, you thought. No one thinks about the dead, the “LESS THANS”.
We roll into a World War whose evil creator thought that he would solve poverty. His political criminals would round up all of the outcasts, the poor and marginalized and simultaneously eliminate poverty once and for all. He would eliminate the ‘margins’ himself, everyone that didn’t meet his arbitrary ‘margin’, the “Less Thans”.
But don’t you fret none, No! Not at all. The newly created Industrial War Machine will energetically seek out ‘less thans’, on every continent and in every nation. Then… we will have war, on the “Less Thans”.
In 1960s America, the ‘margins’ are eerily quiet. Simmering like a cauldron of desperation and evil intent. Soon the margins would rise-up and demand their rights. Equality rights, Women’s rights, Black rights, Hippie rights, sexual rights, gay rights, the cauldron boils over with protests, fights, wars and death! Everyone fighting for “their own” rights against the official ‘Margin’! Well,,, Not everyone.
There are no soldiers, planes or boats, no armies… No one to fight for the rights of the ‘Un-born’, we just casually consider them, a margin – “Less Thans”.
A runaway freight train barrels through my own ‘marginalized’ childhood and early adulting. Everywhere I am, I fight with a sense of unexplained paranoia, trying to keep from dipping my toe across someone else’s margin. It’s a maddening fight. **Politicians, criminals all, keeping a sharp eye on the chasm, & the “Less Thans”.
Our first female president, never assembles her cabinet of choice, or her second cabinet, and she also never establishes her family as a political dynasty! **Why, you ask? Because 3 generations of voters, Yes, ‘voters’, one and all, were thoughtlessly, venomously tossed and discarded into millions of bloody dumpsters in millions of blood soaked back alleys. ***Hmmm, sounds like “Revenge of the Less Thans”, against the ‘Margins’.
Politics has been a cancerous scourge on the American landscape for over 100 years… Politicians have been a cancerous scourge against the middle class and nuclear families for over 100 years, but, even they observed a self-inflicted ‘Margin’. That slim and flimsy barrier of decency, that said “Mud-slinging & Muck-raking is great and attacking personal families were off limits”… This is also the creed of organized crime.
Knowing all of this, why-o-why would ‘we the people’ allow politics to De-volve into “Hyper-Politics”. WE, ALL, have become their ‘Less Thans’. They have, and always will, take care of themselves, and each other, but not you. They shudder with fright at the thought, of all you ‘Less Thans’, wanting fair treatment, wanting to beat the ‘margins’. It doesn’t matter which tentacle of this political octopus you call your own, the other seven…Hate you.! You are their, “Less Than”!
I am too grey, there’s a margin against that. I am too fat.!! There has Always, Definitely, been a margin against that. Now, sadly, I am a sickly, dying cripple. Well… Wouldn’t you know,,, There’s even a margin against that.
Margins here, Margins there, Arbitrary Margins Everywhere!! PREJUDICES ALL. WHY, my brothers and sisters, Why? I Will NOT Be… I REFUSE to Be… a “LESS THAN”!! – – – – – JOY- JOY- JOY, please let me know what you think. Mark “G”.
