A raise without a shift
Somewhere today, the world's highest-paid head of state is getting a raise of a million dollars. No factory floor. No overtime. No performance review a citizen could file a complaint about. Just a number, adjusted upward, because the people who set such numbers tend to be generous with themselves.
Meanwhile, in Yemen, the World Food Programme is explaining, again, why food insecurity keeps deepening. Off the coast of Somalia, hijackers are returning to old hunting grounds because regional chaos has reopened them. In Saudi Arabia, Houthi strikes have just wounded dozens of workers and set oil facilities on fire — workers who, until that moment, were doing exactly what our civic creed asks of everyone able-bodied: showing up, contributing, earning their bread.
Put these next to each other and a useful, uncomfortable question appears. We say those who can work should work — dignity through contribution, not idleness as an ideal. Fair enough. But how, exactly, do we tell the difference between someone who won't work and someone who cannot?
The test we quietly skip
It is tempting, from a warm office in a stable democracy, to treat idleness as a character flaw. Lazy people exist, certainly — every society has some. But laziness is the explanation we reach for when we haven't bothered to ask the harder question: what door was actually open to this person?
A fisherman near Somalia's coast, watching the state that once policed those waters dissolve into overlapping militias, has two options: starve quietly, or take up something more dangerous. Call the second option many things. Laziness is not one of them. It is, grimly, a form of enterprise — just aimed at the wrong target, because the legitimate target was removed.
A family in Yemen, sitting in a market with no goods and no currency worth trading, is not choosing leisure. War closed the factory, salted the field, and mined the road to the port. The WFP does not measure laziness. It measures the gap between willingness and possibility — and that gap, this week, is widening for reasons that have nothing to do with character.
Who actually gets to rest
And then there is the leader with the million-dollar raise. Here is a person whose position is, definitionally, secure regardless of output. No Houthi missile threatens his salary. No collapsing currency erodes his morning. If we are going to be strict about who has earned their reward through labour, the audit should perhaps start at the top of the pay scale, not the bottom.
This is not envy dressed as ethics. It is a reminder that the discipline we ask of the poor — work if you are able — is only fair if we apply the same curiosity to the powerful: are you, in fact, doing something that justifies what you take? A raise untethered from any visible contribution is not a scandal by itself. But it is an odd place to stand while lecturing famine-struck households about the virtue of showing up to a job that no longer exists.
A standpoint, not just a wink
So here is the stance, plainly: the principle stands — those who can work, should. It is good for the person and good for the society that needs their hands. But before applying that principle to anyone, a democracy owes them one honest check: is the opportunity actually there?
Where war has burned the market, where pirates have replaced police, where a state has stopped functioning as a state — the moral failure is not laziness. It is the absence of the very conditions that make honest work possible. Compassion, in those cases, is not softness. It is accuracy.
And where someone enjoys comfort simply because they hold a title, the same standard of curiosity applies, only sharper. A raise is not proof of virtue. Neither is a job's absence proof of vice. The measure, always, is opportunity — who built it, who removed it, and who benefits from us not asking the question at all.