does making a lot of money make you behave badly?

"as a person's levels of wealth increase, their feelings of compassion and empathy go down, and their feelings of deservingness, entitlement and their ideology of self-interest increase."

paul piff at berkeley did a TEDtalk called, "does money make you mean?" (watch the video of the monopoly game, it's hilarious). the video came out in december of last year, but on february 2, there was an op-ed in the ny times called, "how inequality hollows out the soul."

what does that mean in real life? (a picture on zach vella's instagram feed shows a naked girl - or is that me - tortured and bound to a mercedes symbol. her hands and feet appear to be bleeding.

a reporter from a major news source called me and asked what was going on with

zach vella (my next door neighbor and the developer) and the condo project beside me, 11 north moore, which is getting quite a lot of attention with its $40 million penthouse apartment. the real estate agent representing it is fredrik eklund, whose second claim to fame is the reality show, the real deal. leo dicaprio, amongst others, famously toured the sales office.

paul piff found that more wealthy people were "able to moralize greed being good and the pursuit of self-interest being favorable and moral..."

the video came out in december of last year, but on february 2, there was an op-ed in the ny times called, "how inequality hollows out the soul."

"Paul Piff, also a psychologist at Berkeley, has shown that higher status is indeed associated with more unethical and narcissistic behavior. Mr. Piff found that drivers of more expensive cars were less likely to give way to pedestrians or to other cars. Higher status people were also more likely to help themselves to candies that they had been told were intended for children. He found that they also had a greater sense of entitlement and were less generous."

my youngest daughter is a serious student. she is always responsible, shockingly bright and very hardworking. getting into a great college is what keeps her up at night and she just turned 15. 

friday morning, i woke with a jolt thinking her alarm hadn't gone off. i jumped, but then realized that the light had changed and i was mistaken. so i said, "don't worry, you can still sleep for ten minutes."

she answered, "it's 6:58 and i've told you over and over that i wake up at 7:15! it is 6:58 so i still have 17 minutes to sleep - not TEN minutes!"

me: "what difference does it make if it is 17 or 10 minutes? in the end, it doesn't matter how smart you are or what college you get into if you are making other people feel small or stupid or taken advantage of."

i told her (like i tell all my kids) that the most important thing they can be is considerate to other people.

then the construction workers started shouting and banging in front of my bedroom window and it occurred to me that, in today's world, it's simply not true. 

many successful, wealthy people are quite comfortable taking advantage of or hurting the people who seem "unimportant" to them from the doorman to their less fortunate neighbors.

that ability to believe yourself "above" ethical or compassionate behavior - or even traffic rules - is now standard amongst the american wealthy. look at lisa demack who drove her mercedes through a stop sign and hit an ambulance. or the wealthy texas boy who killed four people and was acquitted because he suffered "affluenza."  (his parents could probably afford a very good lawyer).

the idea that there is opportunity (or even justice) for an ordinary person - wait, middle-class, college-educated, living in expensive real estate - is a lie. clearly, i am not a poor person, but i am disempowered.

the u.s. today is more like a developing country. anyone who has lived in asia or latin america or africa knows that the only life that is really valuable is the life of an upperclass person.

so, after offering to clean up the flood, rent my apartment and fix it up, give me the money for the repairs or even talk to me - what happened? um, nothing. zach vella went on holiday in the caribbean. AFTER hanging an enormous sign for his project on the scaffolding outside my building.

my lawyer asked for them to pay for the repairs or at, the very least, follow up on all their offers. they simply ignored him. without a lot more money to pay for legal fees, they knew i wasn't going to do more than make demands. 

oh, and zach put his OWN apartment on the market. (been wondering what all guys carrying marble in and out were doing. it would be $20-40,000 to return my apartment to its previous state - how hard would it have been to do it at the same time?

the end of the TEDtalk cheered me up. it IS possible for the 1% to feel compassion, as long as they faced it.

did i mention i briefly saw zach on the street two weeks' ago? he avoided me and rushed across the street to his big black SUV. (however, i do have plenty of friends who prove that the 1% are capable of kindness and compassion)

the truth is, none of us are perfect. we've all made mistakes or been inconsiderate, but taking responsibility for your actions, with compassion and empathy should not be restricted to the 99%.

 

the c-word: the immaterial girl & zach vella

see the tiny building on the right, that's where i live. the big glass one on the left is imaginary but its already causing havoc.

typical nyc story - an ordinary person versus a real estate mogul. a developer (zach vella, who also ended becoming my next door neighbor), in the process of building a new property, damages a nearby property. i met zach because his little boy, with regal air, was telling all the other little kids on the sidewalk that HIS dad owned the whole building.

zach looks so nice, doesn't he?

zach apologized for his son and walked over and looked at my apartment. we even had a conversation about his possibly renting it as a sales office or buying the whole thing and attaching it to the new building.

it's difficult, on our cramped little island, to build. but when you are building apartments that sell for $6 million on the low end, you might be careful of your neighbors (especially single mothers recovering from cancer with already stretched incomes and tiny apartments).

on november 8, i came home to MY kids' room 6 inches' deep in muddy water, so i pulled on my big yellow boots and ran screaming into the building site next door.

the site supervisor and a bunch of guys came in and apologized and promised to pay for everything they destroyed.

they also promised to come and help clean up. i didn't realize how often this happens. (like the story of this photographer in chelsea), i believed them and i was still being nice.

rara's bedroom entrance and my famous yellow rubber boots

needless to say, two days' later, i was on my hands and knees with a bucket of hot water and some mold killing product, scraping the mud off the floor.  i basically spent an entire weekend, with some help from the housekeeper and the amazons, without seeing daylight. two laptops were totally submerged, one filled with college applications in-process.

this whole floor was replaced last january.

no one showed up.

a few days' later, i had a pleasant conversation with jim longson, at zach vella's company. he was kind, friendly and reassuring. he told me they would "make me whole." he suggested i hire mold remediators immediately and told me simply to send them all the bills.

i did. but after that, jim longson didn't take my calls. two weeks' later, he sent me an email suggesting i call my home owner's insurance. i called good old state farm. the adjuster came over and spoke to the site supervisor who told him he thought the water came in through the sidewalk. fortunately for me, my condo policy specifically says they do not cover water that comes in through the sidewalk. or the foundation of my building. the contractor, saif sumaida, whose company, foundations group, is doing the work had someone tell me that they had informed their insurance. charles iulo, a guy who worked for him, reiterated that they would do nothing, but he did say, "i urge you to contact your insurance."

here's family man, saif, who doesn't return my calls either.

in the meantime, the water shortcircuited the electricity downstairs which meant the pump died and the toilet waste emptied into the shower turning the entire downstairs into a giant, reeking cesspool.

in staten island, days after sandy, i walked past one home after the other with the mudsoaked contents spilling out on to the sidewalk, enormous piles of the stuff of 21st-century lives. wet clothes, plastic toys, dishwashers, washing machines, refrigerators, books, artwork. it slid down into the mud and channels of water mixed with sewage that filled the roads.

i was so grateful that i had escaped the storm, that i went to staten island to rip out drywall turned to putty by water, empty out bathrooms, pull off baseboard and wallpaper. the stench and the pervading damp seemed to permeate my body for days afterwards. and the mud seemed impossible to remove from my coat and boots.

helping people in staten island, coney island and rockaway made the transience of objects and the fragility of our lives so much clearer. i wanted to get rid of everything i owned.

so, of course, i was given an easy way to do that. three days after my electricity and internet was restored, my most precious things were destroyed.

all the beautiful indian clothes - the old brocades that my grandmother had bought back when my grandfather was indian ambassador to japan, that had made my wedding gharara, the lehngas and saris and ghararas that had been stored in a steamer trunk for safekeeping - were drenched and soaked in mud. the stuffed toys and mementos that i had saved from their infancy (you know, the baby clothes sasha came home from the hospital in, the leopard that zarina gave rara when her head was cracked) not to mention their current clothes and homework and shoes, and the floor was buckled.

all these clothes were destroyed. i can't afford to pick up the rest from the drycleaner.

what is worse, of course, is the mold. which makes the girls cough all night unless the air purifier is blasting into their bedrooms and the dehumidifier along with the allergen killing blue light is on 24-hours' a day.

even my doctor at memorial sloan kettering says i need to get out of there. mold is especially bad for people who've had chemotherapy.

i've called the department of buildings repeatedly, i've spoken to community board one, to the new state attorney general's office, julie menin who is running for manhattan borough president, and no one seems to be able to do anything.

i went to see a very impressive and reassuring lawyer, adam leitman bailey, who said, "it's an open-and-shut case. they admitted liability. they realize they don't have to do anything. you just need to show them, they can't ignore the little guy." he was happy to take on the case. unfortunately, he required a $10,000 retainer. gulp.

one kid in college, another one starting in september and two years' worth of bills a mile high.

i tried to hit up a client who hadn't paid me for a couple of years, no luck.

AUGH. in the meantime, in what seems like an anachronistic paradigm, the new york city real estate industry celebrates its moneymaking heroes, like zach vella. isn't conscious capitalism the new buzz word?

so here's what happened next: amazons of nyc: 11 N Moore St - Zach Vella and Saif Sumaida Update

ameena & the amazons

it's funny how the things that throw you in life are never the big ones. those big historical events where you save the newspaper in a plastic bag (until you lose the bag in the piles of magazines and recycling)  don't really mean as much at breakfast. as thrilling as it was to have obama elected president, not much changed in the ensuing days or weeks - at least, not in my apartment. (rather, we had to move out. but that was the trajectory we were on anyway.)

september 11, 2001: even living through the chaos and the shock and the drama downtown, didn't rock our lives in the same way my extended family managed to do it. this september, i kept thinking about that article in the new york times back in december, 2001. "ameena is celebrating the holidays with a cast of thousands..." even when the air outside was still hazy with smoke, we were a happy, layered family and i used to congratulate myself for getting it right.

then all of a sudden, my life is a rollercoaster like the emotional lives of my three teenagers in an apartment with huge leaky skylights that's as up-and-down as my financial life, cancer and unpredictable exhusbands and nothing happens quite the way i imagined it.

occasionally, parents of younger children who are getting divorced ask me advice. i say the same thing now, "i have no idea." even two years' ago, i could have told you how to manage a blissful blended family. i could have told you how my exhusbands come to sunday dinner or stay at my parents' house for christmas, how we bake cakes and give them parties on their birthdays. i could have told you why we never needed to make strict rules about who goes to whose house when because we were loving and civilized.

because we were always more concerned about what was good for the amazons than anything else.

i would have told you that once you were in love with someone you always still cared about them and wished them the best, even though you didn't want to stay together.

a few years ago, i could have told you how to raise girls so they had high self-esteem and no body image problems. how to teach them it was better to be smart than pretty. how to teach your kids to make wise decisions in adolescence.

excuse me while i collapse in laughter. or is it tears?

then again, some days, maybe just for the day, everything comes together. and we are our happy tribe again, the amazons prancing through the wilds of new york city. maybe it's the perfect trip to target. or dinner at mr. chow's during restaurant week. 

other days, we are all still reeling. my answering machine is full of things i want to avoid and the newspapers are overflowing with rage and whooped-up rabble rousers. i feel myself and my beliefs slandered and libeled. i wonder if the anger - towards bankers, big business, immigrants, muslims, gay and lesbians, teachers, obama - roiling through this country will take us back to germany in 1920.

this morning, rain torrents threw themselves against the skylight (while i murmured prayers that they didn't break through). zarina yelled from downstairs, "mama, it's six o' clock!" (and went back to bed, i'm sorry to say) and i emerged from the beach resort of my dream life. i have the loveliest pillow.

after i sorted out the latest morning dramas and came close to feeding everyone breakfast, i stood perfectly still for a few seconds. i stood still and took it all in. the cool, smooth floor under my bare feet. the smell of the chocolate muffins in the air.  i looked at sasha's leather jacket thrown on the back of the blue sofa (that i bought because it floated on the carpet like the sea on a summer day) and rara's battered keds. my fingers were still sticky with the juice of the melon i cut into slices at six-thirty. i breathed and felt the air move slowly down through my sternum into my belly. the apartment was silent, except for the rain, gentler now, against the glass and the occasional clank of cars moving in the parking lot outside.

i remembered that wherever i was was temporary.

life, the big catastrophes and the small historical events, is moving so fast that there is barely a moment to think that we've got it all wrong. or all right.

we just have to stop and be happy to be here.

(in our case, in the urban jungle).