An Open Letter to the Boss

By Helen Flannery

Dear Mr. Springsteen,

My name is Helen, and I am your biggest fan.

I first saw you in concert when I was in high school. It was in 1985, during your Born in the USA tour. Your show at the Pontiac Silverdome had sold out in 15 minutes. But a friend of mine won tickets from a local radio station, so we and 69,842 other attendees got to see you play for — if I remember right — more than four and a half hours, including four encores.

Back in those days, I had a picture of you up on the door of my locker. I listened to The River and Nebraska while I was doing my homework. I wrote about you in my college application. I even dated a classmate named Bruce (mainly, in retrospect, because he shared your name).

You became my hero, not just because your music is so good — and fun! — but also because your lyrics spoke to me. You understood pain and joy. You wrote about the struggles and triumphs everyday people go through. You were brave enough to talk about class. And you articulated how economic inequality affects real human lives.

As someone who lived in southeastern Michigan in the early ’80s, that meant a lot.

Now, decades after that show, I research economic inequality for a living. I study how billionaires are raking in more than ever, and how they’re doing it at the expense of the rest of us. I see how that prevents people I love from earning a decent living, owning homes, going to college, getting the medical care they need, retiring with dignity, living on a healthy planet, and living without fear.

What I research, specifically, is the relationship between inequality and charity. My work shows that everyday donors are disappearing, unable to give as much as they used to because they’re slipping further into debt and despair. As small donors disappear, charities become more dependent on the random goodwill of wealthy donors. That hurts charities and anybody who depends on them, and it’s getting worse.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Billionaires could be paying their fair share of taxes to support the systems we all depend on. We don’t have to let them get out of it with tax cuts, deductions, and shelters. I don’t think anyone actually needs a billion dollars to live a comfortable life — but billionaires always seem to want more.

So when I saw that you had made it onto the Forbes billionaires list this year with a net worth of $1.2 billion, I was surprised and, I have to say, a little sad. My working-class hero had joined the ranks of these super-wealthy people I read about every day. What will he do now, I wondered? Now that he’s up there with all those heiresses and Rockefellers?

Please, Mr. Springsteen, be a model for your fellow billionaires: Don’t stay one.

Please give away some of that money. And not to a private foundation or a donor-advised fund. The typical wealthy donor pours zillions of dollars into those kinds of holding tanks, and only a trickle of that money comes out to charities doing real work on the ground. Our country’s charities need that money now.

You’ve already proven you’re a bold and direct giver. At every one of your concerts that I’ve been to since 1985, you donated a portion of the proceeds to local charities — food banks, veterans support groups, farm aid organizations — based in the town where you were performing. You sometimes even invited representatives of those groups up onto stage with you.

This all sets a fantastic precedent, and you can continue it now in a bigger way than ever.

It’s absolutely true what you said: “Poor man wanna be rich, rich man wanna be king, and the king ain’t satisfied until he rules everything.” I’m begging you not to be a typical rich man. I know we can have a country where everyone has an equal chance at a decent life. But the only way we’re going to get there is if the wealth isn’t hoarded at the top.

And I believe you know that too. You’ve never shuttered yourself off in that mansion on a hill. You’ve spoken powerfully recently about how authoritarianism is ramping up in our country, putting yourself out on a limb for the most vulnerable among us and earning vicious attacks from President Trump, one of our most pernicious wannabe kings.

So I’m guessing that you’re already thinking about this. If you are, I urge you to follow your heart. You can lead the others by example, and you can do it with the brilliance and compassion and humor and wisdom you’ve shown your whole career.

Love, Helen

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Previously Published on inequality.org with Creative Commons License

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