LO's Theory of Redistribution

"The MAN needs to keep his damn hands off my farm!"

There has been some conversation in the media lately about whether or not our government should be in the business of spreading wealth out a little more evenly.

I am saddened to admit that LO does not take after his uber-liberal mother. He regards the pooling of resources and the redistribution of wealth with suspicion bordering on outright hostility. I have no doubt that he would be declaiming me as a dirty Socialist if the triple-S found within the operative word were not beyond his current linguistic capabilities.

He made his political leanings quite clear at breakfast this weekend.  J, LO and I were all in Columbus, Ohio to visit with old friends. We decided to stop at the fantabulous Northstar Cafe for breakfast on Sunday. Since this was hardly our first attempt at dining out with LO, I came prepared:

If you look closely, you'll see that I carry no fewer than 11 toy cars in my purse at any given moment. (And yes, my purse does play the music clowns have been exiting VW Bugs to for time immemorial.)

For reasons that are still unclear to myself, I took all 11 cars out at Northstar yesterday morning. A family with a little boy of just about LO's age sat down in the adjacent booth and remarked that they must still be amateurs because they had not brought any toys.

The other little boy was eyeing LO's overwhelming vehicular wealth with clear envy in his eyes. Never before has there been so clear a demarcation between the haves and the have-nots. As a card-carrying Democrat, it was clear to me that this inequity could not stand.

"Your little boy can play with them," I told the other family. "We just need to distract LO."

So, I waited until LO was focusing on one car in particular and otherwise occupied before I started re-stashing several of the cars back in my purse. Provided I leave most of the cars alone, placing several of them back in the magical bag of Mom necessities does not bother the young man. I'm sure that he simply considers my purse a kind of offshore account for his wealth. Once LO was certain that I was only reorganizing the particular jurisdiction under which his wealth resided, I passed one of LO's least favorite vehicles (as in, it wasn't either of these:

a Matchbox BMW 2002 and a Batmobile Monster Truck) to J under the table, and he then palmed it over to the other kid.

It took several moments for LO to notice that his car was being operated by unauthorized user (anyone other than himself), but his rage at the unfairness of it was swift and loud. Luckily, the young man at all times possesses an incredible fluency of tongue and a firm grasp of rhetoric. He turned to me and declaimed, "Mother, the utopian schemes of [redistribution of wealth], and a community of goods, are as visionary and impracticable as those that vest all property in the Crown. [These ideas] are arbitrary, despotic, and, in our government, unconstitutional!"

Well, I might be paraphrasing a bit. His actual words (ahem) might have been more along the lines of "AAARRRRRRRGGGHHHHH!" He also started throwing himself across the table in a clear vigilante attempt to recover his property, which is apparently legal in many parts of the country.

We're not sure if it was the vehemence of LO's political beliefs or another reason, but the other young family quickly returned the car and moved to sit down at a completely different table.

(May I just say that it really is a shame that political discourse these days is such that two people on opposite ends of the spectrum can't break bread together?)

Despite LO's very clear vehicle conservative tendencies, I do hope to impress upon him sometime in the next 16 years that owning all of something does make him a job creator.

We'll see if it sinks in.