It’s ten past 3, or just after, and it’s hot as hell. I’m sweating so that my shirt is damp and my glasses want to slide off my nose. It’s hot, and I’m trying to write something important.
Trying, but afraid, as always, that I’ll say it wrong. Or worse; not say it at all.
And here I am, already wasting time working on unimportant issues of grammar and syntax. No matter how hard I tell myself to focus on getting it down on paper (so to speak) I still find myself getting lost in the small issues that can always be fixed later.
So once again, to myself and for demonstration purposes: get it said, then worry about layout.
But what is it that I want to say? There’s so much to say that it seems overwhelming. Where do you start when everything you see seems to be wrong somehow? There doesn’t appear to be a beginning when everything is wrong and has always been in my eyes.
But a point seems to be as good as any other, so now to stop further time wasting with word-mincing.
The world is crazy.
And I know people say it all the time, and we all kinda look at them and think ‘yeah, all of us are crazy, you’re the only sane one.’ And people always see things their own way, so inevitably we don’t listen. It becomes irrelevant if they are right or wrong.
So maybe I’m the crazy one. And maybe there’s no point saying anything because no one will listen anyway. But dammit it feels so important. It always has.
People are lying to you. To all of us. People are taking your money, and making you think that you now have something important.
Cool.
What is cool? Cool is more than acceptance, right? It’s acceptance by the people you aspire to. Cool is fitting in. cool is not fitting in, sometimes. Cool is danger in the safest form, and cool is what we all want to be.
But what is it? Cool is an idea. It is a concept of identity, and one particularly prominent in today’s youth culture. No one wants to be that deadly word: uncool.
And who needs to be rich anyway, right? Who needs millions of dollars, fast cars, big houses, servants? Who needs money? Money doesn’t buy happiness, it’s true.
In fact, it buys quite the opposite. Money buys unhappiness every day, for millions of people.
The fact is that to survive in modern society you need at least a modicum of cash. You must pay bills, buy food, shelter, clothing, and transport. All of these things you must have, in order to keep acquiring the money needed to keep having these things.
And, it would seem, to be cool.
If your mum shops at target and op shops, you are not cool. If you wear dunlops instead of nikes, you are not cool. My girlfriend recently returned from a party where she found the other girls looked down upon her for not wearing supre clothing. The strange thing to me is that all of the girls were dressed the same way, if not wearing the same exact items, and Tammie was the one to be judged inferior. I suppose she wasn’t a matching clone, but does being different make you less cool?
Unimportant… so so trivial is the shallow ideals of schoolgirls.
Again I catch myself editing.
We are being sold this idea, so that we will spend the few dollars we can save over the years to make our later years comfortable. Who knows what tomorrow will bring anyway? No point dying with money in the bank! And let’s not forget: it’s not cool to get old.
But I can understand the selfish motives of a man who has found a way to make himself more money, a way which isn’t called stealing in any but a moral sense… *ahem*
But of the everyday consumer… how does our behaviour find explanation? Why do we throw away our meager pennies on rubbish we don’t want or need, whose prices become higher and higher every day and whose quality becomes ever poorer and poorer and ever more irrelevant. We are not the ones with huge sums of money in the bank! We are not the ones who can afford it! Why are we so easily led that we will buy this shit, just because we can?
We want our high standard of life, our high technology, our creature comforts, our life of luxury. But we seem to be dazzled all the time by image and marketing. We ignore the reality of a product in favour of its image; just as we are doing to the world in general.
For the sad reality is that the ever growing ‘produce, market, sell, consume, discard’ trend of the world is not self sustaining. Products are at affordable prices because they are made by slaves who struggle to survive. The products cannot be made by people who live like us because then the prices would have to go up a lot, to continue the disgusting profits seen by top executives from large corporations.
My own father made millions of dollars designing faster, smaller and more versatile computer parts, and he was just small-fry. He was just one man to provide a service to be bought, because large companies don’t make anything anymore. There is too much risk in owning a manufacturing plant – too many overheads, too many mouths to feed, and what if a product fails? It could be the end of the business! No, far better to pay a smaller company (who hires slaves and pays them a salary of rice and water) to build the products for you.
The moral criminals here are the ones who buy in designs, pay someone to build them, and then sell them for huge sums to consumers everywhere, who, despite having so many creature comforts, seem to always need more, prettier, faster, better ones. And I am no better! I buy fancy products, I have always lived in a large and spacious home and I am just another typical mindless consumer! But the issue isn’t “Who is to blame?” The issue is “There is something wrong. How do we fix it?”
How do we fix it? Can it even be stopped? And who will stop it? Who will step in and save the exploited people? Who will explain to a young audience that they are being manipulated by evil, greedy men? (And why would they listen to someone so uncool anyway?) The government? The government needs money to fund public health, public roads, public housing, education, defense, so on and so on and so on… the people who have the real money are not consumers. They are big business. Why would government step in and essentially castrate their main source of income? Even politicians have heard the expression “don’t bite the hand that feeds…”
Perhaps we could take some information, some research, some facts and figure to the people – broadcast it upon TV, the radio, print it in newspapers and magazines – let the people see the truth and decide for themselves. But oh, wait… who owns the TV stations, the newspapers, the radio…? Oh, right… men with lots of money… aye caramba, what a depressing notion.
No, there is no saviour here. There is no superman, despite the existence of very clear and real supervillians. There seems no hope at all for a world created by greedy and selfish men, and hence built to accommodate them and now so perfectly suited to their lifestyles.
Yes, this habitat of filthy rich men will slowly become unlivable for us, killing us all slowly; all the way up the “money chain” until even these rich men starve and die. But what do they care? Why the hell would you deprive yourself, for the sake of a future generation? Or for the sake of the rest of the world? Why? You wouldn’t, and the sad truth is that, let’s face it, none of us would. Even if the entire system were changed, would it make the world a good place? Almost inevitably things would be the same, just with other people taking advantage of a different set of circumstances. And perhaps there I find my answer – every day consumers keep buying mindlessly because we are all just as greedy as the moral criminals who profit from it – we are just too lazy to actually acquire that many of them.
Pity on us all, for we are the evil ones.
The Human Race is DOOMED!
