Profit Over People
This can’t be it. This can’t be the end game. Working to keep a roof over the head and food in the fridge with the electricity still on and that’s it. That’s not living, that’s modern slavery of the capitalistic type. Lock people into basic living situations that keep them trapped in work that is next to meaningless, not for the greater good, not for tomorrow. Work that’s designed to extract from today, from our neighbors, from our communities– for the sake of profit over people.
Everywhere I look, and I mean everywhere, our humanity is being erased for profit. Endless profit seeking to redistribute resources to the 0.01%. That’s it. That’s the entire game in America right now.
Our economy is propped up on the dreams of an illusive intelligence that is artificial and unnecessary. Pushed down our throats by flawed white men, high on Ketamine and power, playing God with the technology they created off the back of the Commons. An unnecessary bubble these technologists knowingly created to feed their insatiable greed and lust for dominance.
And those who are insulated from this late stage capitalism are simply in a different form of lockin. The only people participating in this economy now are those who work for the 0.01% or serve them in some way. There’s enough concentration of wealth for that demographic to pretend that the world isn’t collapsing around them. Until the destruction is absolute.
The rest of us must choose. Wedge ourselves into an entity somehow that also serves the 0.01% and hope we can eek out enough to keep our prisons filled with food and electricity. Or, we work 2-3 gig jobs, live with roommates, work around the clock and hope that we get a portion of an afternoon to sleep and do our laundry. That’s really it. Work enough to pay the bills, whatever that entails in a collapsing economy, a desolate labor market and a defunct government run by oligarchs stealing in the shadows and screaming in the light.
What of the artists? The creators? The builders? The writers? The makers? The misfits who are driven not by paychecks but by purpose. We are forced to choose. Do we produce art and risk homelessness? Do we choose beauty and ignore our hunger pains? Do we choose mission and turn a blind eye to the electric bills?
These aren’t the choices of a healthy society. Such choices should bring shame to the leaders of this land. Forcing the beauty out of a population does nothing but create anger, resistance and eventually rebellion.
Feudalism and subservience to heartless billionaires driven by ego and greed are not choices to live by. Forcing a population into the lesser of these evils will not last. The America I grew up in has always been deeply flawed, but I was raised to fight for a better tomorrow. I was taught to seek something better and more just than where we are now and to fight for the possibility of a prosperous tomorrow.
And I was raised to love my country, and defend it. But how does one show love for its abuser? How do we show love for a land that is stolen, again, by white supremacists seeking to extend an empire far beyond its shelf life? A country that is sliding backwards into the embrace of racists who seek to remove people like me.
What do we do in times like this? We fight to keep the lights on and struggle to keep our internal flame lit long enough to make art from the ashes of destruction.
We hope that humanity wins and that a collapse like the one we're living through forces our society to place people over profits. Finally.
