My Economic Wake-Up Call Protest Sign: A #TeslaTakedown Story
I made a sign for today's #TeslaTakedown, and I should have listened to my family. They suggested that the initial version, without the "How much do you have in common with Elon Musk?" at the bottom, was too confusing. Adding that sentence improved understanding, but now there was too much to read in a protest sign for cars whizzing past. My point was that me and the person driving by giving me a middle finger have far more in common than what either of us have with Elon Musk (and Donald Trump).
Ladder rungs of economic prosperity
My son is taking a gen-ed psychology class in his first year of college, and he was describing a class exercise demonstrating the difficulty people have with probabilities and proportions. That got me thinking about the "cosmic distance ladder". The cosmic distance laddercosmic distance ladder is a series of methods astronomers use to determine the distances to celestial objects, acting as a tool to map the universe. It's called a ladder because each step relies on the previous one, starting with measurements to nearby galaxies and progressing to farther objects.
Let's suppose the median net worth of an American—the point at which half the people in the country have more and half the people in the country have less—is $100,000. So, standing there in the middle of the protest, the 10 people around me have a total net worth of $1,000,000—a million dollars. And the 100 people or so between and the street corner? That is ten million dollars. And the 1,000 people walking and driving by the #TeslaTakedown protest? That's a hundred million dollars.
The capacity of a triple-A minor league baseball stadium is about 10,000 people; the median net worth of that crowd is a billion dollars. The capacity of Ohio Stadium, where the Ohio State University football team plays, is 100,000, and the net worth is ten billion dollars. It is only at this point that reach Donald Trump's net worth. The population of Franklin County, Ohio—the seat of the state capitol—is just over 1,000,000 people, and the total median net worth is $100,000,000. Elon Musk's net worth is about $350,000,000—so three Franklin-county's-worth of people.
So when I said that the person throwing the middle finger at me has more in common with me than Musk, that's what I meant.
The actual median net worth of an American household is just short of $200,000, so we are not that far off with this economic prosperity ladder (assuming two earners per household). And the really perverse part? Remember that the median is the point at which half the population is above that amount and half the population is below. Don't confuse that with the average...that'll be the sum of everyone's net worth divided by the number of people in the country. That number is just over $1,000,000 per household. The highest highs have skewed the average that much.
Now, at the risk of reducing a person's value to a dollar amount, that is what I was trying to say in my sign. Wealth is a tool, not an identity; a person's kindness, resilience, and hope for a better world hold real value...and I saw a lot of kindness, resilience, and hope at the protest today. Yet, despite the immense kindness and resilience I was in the middle of, it's disheartening how wealthy people are overriding the collective interests of the country.
And that is far too much to put on a sign.
About making the protest sign
I'm adding my notes here about creating the protest sign, because clearly I'll need to make a different one for next week. The base of the sign is an old campaign yard sign—about 26 inches by 16 inches. Using a graphics program, I made an image at those dimensions. My plan was to print it out as a set of tiles on letter-sized paper and then tape them together. Unfortunately, the MacOS printer driver doesn't do this (...anymore? I thought it did at one point). Fortunately, a free web service called Rasterbator will make a PDF of tile pages for me. I uploaded the sign, selected US-Letter paper in landscape orientation, then selected an output size of "2.45 sheets wide". That will output 6 sheets for a final size of 24.98" x 15.38"...pretty close! This is what it looked like in the end.
