Yes, Dawn, there is a greedy adult threatening Santa

The e-mail from this Schaumburg mother of three has an earnest, pleading quality. But Dawn doesn't desire anything from me. She just wants to let folks know what's wrong in America.

Her kids want Santa to bring a video game system and a new building set -- not unreasonable requests, especially for kids who donate time joining their mom and dad doing volunteer work at church.

With income from her husband's work as an electrician, pay from her modest stay-at-home job and the "pin money" Dawn makes as a lunch supervisor at her kids' school, the parents have gift money set aside should Santa need help.

But you can't find those toys in stores -- only on the Internet where the price has been doubled and tripled during this season of giving.

"It is all about getting. People buy up popular items so they can make a profit," writes the mom, who doesn't want me to print her last name for fear her kids would see it and lose their faith in Santa Claus. "I am just tired of this. I want to give my kids a good Christmas, get items they would love; but money-hungry, greedy scrooges are ruining it."

We are a greedy society. One of the seven deadly sins, greed has been around forever. What is new is that we feel no shame in it.

This isn't a lecture about commercialism or a rant against 42-inch flat-screen TVs. It's about the greed that motivates adults to snatch up all the Hannah Montana tickets to Saturday's concert in Rosemont for the sole purpose of scalping them to desperate parents of fragile children. Greed begets greed.

We celebrate our greed, aspire to become greedy, and make idols of our greediest.

You can argue that a nation founded by people who stole land from the previous occupants was born of greed. But our Founding Fathers saw their new nation and its government as nurturing life, protecting liberty and providing opportunities for the pursuit of happiness.

James Madison, the "Father of the Constitution," wanted laws to "reduce extreme wealth to a state of mediocrity, and raise extreme indigence toward a state of comfort."

Bemoaning the "misery" of economic inequality, Thomas Jefferson opted to "tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise."

That all changed during the campaign by another man who would be president.

"Are you better off than you were four years ago?" Ronald Reagan asked Americans in 1980.

Not my favorite Republican, Reagan still got my vote, in part because of my answer to his question. Only later did it dawn on me that the real question for America should have been "Are we better off than we were four years ago?", or even "Is the world better off than it was four years ago?"

Under Reagan, the United States abandoned the concept of "ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country," and glommed on to a concept of a government as little more than an enabler for the greedy. In Illinois, we've seen public servants go to jail in the name of greed.

The "greed is good" mantra of movie character Gordon Gekko of "Wall Street" could be our national motto.

We live in a nation where people, like our government, live in debt to satisfy our greed. We reward companies that fire breadwinners as a way to distribute more profits to its richest stockholders.

Reagan talked of our nation as "a shining city on a hill."

The original "city on a hill" quote is from the Bible. Writers from Chaucer to today have used it. Pilgrim John Winthrop (original governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony) was the first to use it as a metaphor for our country in 1630. John F. Kennedy used "city on a hill" in his 1961 inaugural address.

Reagan simply added the word "shining."

Perhaps that "shining" adjective distracted us from the message of setting a good example. Maybe we focused more on the shine than on what it reflected.

In his 17th-century sermon, Winthrop warned of being "seduced" by "pleasure and profits," said "the rich and mighty should not eat up the poor," and told new Americans to be kind, giving and look after each other.

Dawn's letter paints a different kind of society.

Buying children's toys so you can capture the market and gouge people at Christmas might add more glitter to the greedy, but it certainly isn't a shining moment for our "city on a hill."