The Seven Thieves

I have stood in the rain on the Embarcadero and watched a man with a wife and three children turned away from a day's work because he would not sign away his right to stand up straight. I have seen the club come down. I have counted the dead^[1]. And I have learned something the comfortable people will never learn from a pulpit or a podium: injustice is not an accident. It is not weather. It does not fall on us out of the sky. It is built—plank by plank, profit by profit—by men who know exactly what they are doing.

People ask me where injustice comes from. They want a system to blame, an economic law, a chart with a downward line. But strip away the language of the experts and you find something older underneath. You find seven old sins, sitting in the high windows of the city, dressed in good suits, running the machinery that grinds working men down.

The old names—pride, greed, wrath, envy, gluttony, sloth, lust—were never really about private appetite. A hungry man's hunger never broke a city. These are the sins of power, and they are deadly precisely because they sit where the money sits. Every one of them is a thief. Let me name them the way you name a man in a police lineup.

Greed—the thief who steals the bread. The first of them, and the boldest. He takes the bread off the table and calls it the market. He looks at a man's labor—his back, his hands, his hours, his one short life—and sees a commodity to be bought at the lowest price the law and the billy club will allow. Greed wrote the wage that will not feed a family. Greed is why the warehouse is full and the cupboard is bare. He is the father of the other six.

Pride—the thief who steals dignity. He takes the one thing the poor own outright. Pride is the owner who cannot imagine the worker is his equal—who says I built this while standing on a hundred thousand backs whose names he has never troubled to learn. Greed could not sleep at night without Pride in the next room, telling him he earned the bed.

Wrath—the thief who steals safety. Understand me plainly: I do not mean the anger of the wronged. The anger of a hungry man is not a sin—it is a sign of life. I mean the wrath of the powerful: the tear gas, the deputized thug, the headline that calls a starving picket line a riot. Bloody Thursday was not the wrath of working men^[1]. It was the wrath of men who would sooner break a skull than share a dollar.

Envy—the thief who steals solidarity. The most cunning of all, because he robs us of our unity and leaves us thanking him for it. Envy is the foreman's favorite tool. He whispers to one worker that his enemy is the man beside him—the immigrant, the Black worker, the woman at the next bench—anything, anything, so the working man looks sideways with suspicion instead of up with understanding. The men in the high windows are not afraid of our anger. They are afraid of our solidarity, and Envy is how they keep us from it.

Gluttony—the thief who steals proportion. I am not talking about a second helping. I am talking about a banquet laid above a breadline. Gluttony is more-than-enough sitting comfortably beside not-nearly-enough and calling the arrangement natural—the obscene arithmetic of a country that will throw away food before it lets a hungry man eat it.

Sloth—the thief who steals conscience. The deadliest of the seven, and the only one who wears a respectable coat. Do not mistake him for the laborer too exhausted to lift his head. Sloth is the comfortable man who has decided not to look. He is the shrug. He is the sentence it has always been this way. He is the citizen who reads about the man in the rain over his morning coffee and turns the page. Every other sin needs muscle. Sloth needs only that good people do nothing—which is why he is the one sin that recruits its own victims.

Lust—the thief who steals the person. Here I mean the lust of power, not of the bedroom—the appetite to use a human being and discard him. It is the mill that consumes a man's body for forty years and turns him out the gate with nothing. It is the hand that reaches for the worker, the woman, the child, and sees not a soul but a thing to be had and thrown away.

Now here is the thing the comfortable people most want you to forget. This country, underneath all of it, is a moral country. Strip away the high windows and the headlines and you find a people who, in their best hours, have never been able to stand the sight of a bully. America at its heart takes the side of the underdog—the small farmer against the trust, the rank and file against the boss, the man in the rain against the men who made it rain. That instinct is the truest thing about us. The seven thieves spend every waking hour trying to talk us out of it.

I will not be talked out of it. In the pieces that follow I mean to drag each of these seven thieves out into the daylight, one at a time, and show you exactly how he works—because a thief you can name is a thief you can stop.

This is no religious duty. No one is keeping score in heaven. The obligation is simpler and harder than that: it is owed to the man standing next to you in the rain. You do not get to look away. You do not get to decide it has always been this way and always will be. As long as one man's dignity is for sale, the job is not finished.