(2 of 2)
McCall: "I'm lucky to be mistaken for those Harvard assholes. I didn't get to the New Yorker until I was almost 40 because I was afraid of them. I was a yokel from Canada who couldn't go to their dinner parties."
Me: "But now you hang out with them."
McCall: "My father didn't even own a car."
The lesson was clear: Deny, deny, deny. Now if someone asks me if I'm rich, I tell them that during the Depression, my grandfather worked three eight-hour shifts in a row for the post office, sleeping in the back of a mail truck in between stops. If someone asks me how much I've got invested in mutual funds, I tell them I had a mullet in high school.
As to what I should actually do, I sought advice from a rich friend who created a foundation to help fight income inequality. He told me that giving away my money wouldn't change anything, which I thought was just another way the 1% make fun of how little money we three-percenters have. But he meant that the problem is systemic and complex, and can't be solved through single donations or perhaps even by simple redistribution. He advised me to work on grassroots problems instead of calling people hypocrites. In other words: Write columns that no one will read. The only income inequality that is going to solve is mine.