I got a little juice today. Orange juice. From a convenience store. That syrupy orange juice that tastes like it was squeezed from plastic fruit.
I was listening to the radio in my car while I was sipping this sugary shit and heard the whole litany of what's wrong with the country. Obama wants to fire teachers and principals at impoverished schools. He wants nuclear power plants built in Georgia. Republican Senators Jim Bunning and Jon Kyl want the unemployed to starve to death. The insurance industry is alive and well and, provided there is no public option in any health care bill, should manage to bankrupt every single American in the coming years.
I was listening to the radio in my car while I was sipping this sugary shit and heard the whole litany of what's wrong with the country. Obama wants to fire teachers and principals at impoverished schools. He wants nuclear power plants built in Georgia. Republican Senators Jim Bunning and Jon Kyl want the unemployed to starve to death. The insurance industry is alive and well and, provided there is no public option in any health care bill, should manage to bankrupt every single American in the coming years.
What else? Mossad agents are suspected of assassinating a Muslim in Dubai. The war in Afghanistan is heating up ... again. Sectarian violence is ongoing in Iraq. Chechnya is Chechnya. Massive earthquake in Chile, hundreds dead, some infrastructure devastated. Nothing like Haiti, but pretty bad. Hawaiians were warned about a possible tsunami so that should give a clue about its power.
Just more of the same shit happening everywhere in the world.
But there are also things like the coffee parties (the racially and ethnically diverse poor and working class versions of the white middle class and wealthy tea parties) popping up here and there. Some have given money to help the victims of the earthquakes and others have volunteered.Good people--those with few financial resources, influence, or power--do care. Some individuals try to help even when doing so is futile.
Despite all of the advances in technology, all of the scientific discoveries, and the whole of the research that has developed, those who control the structural ways in which capital is used refuse to improve the lives of the world's poor. That's what makes the futility of individual help from those with compassion for the suffering all the more tragic. If only "regular folks" made decisions about how capital was used then perhaps their values would direct the use of resources.
I'm just trying to figure out the goal of the economic and political systems that have dominated the world during my lifetime. It seems fairly obvious that the goal is to funnel ownership, control, and use of capital to a very tiny privileged smattering of individuals and families scattered throughout the world, each managing or ruling organizations in the context of relationships to other organizations, all within a byzantine hierarchy that is both formal and informal (which is why measurements of formal institutional relations give nothing but a distorted picture of reality: if the transfer of money in the drug trade goes unaccounted for in economic models then those models are useless in the real-world. A trillion-dollar global industry that everyone knows about ... that is not a factor in economic policy decisions?).
Really, what story of the world should we be telling ourselves? When all of that shit is weighed out on just about any ethical scale it's impossible to deny that injustice is dominant. There are no lullabies for babies abandoned in dumpsters. Just rats ferociously devouring the flesh of living infants until the baby's dead and there's nothing but bone and blood-soaked trash left behind.
Then again, that's all the more reason to make love in the middle of a busy intersection or interstate entry/exit ramp during rush hour. I mean, really, sexually sharing love with another human being while holding up traffic to halt economic and social routines seems like one of the best possible responses to injustice that I can imagine right now. Well, I should get going. It's about 3:20 right now. Traffic's probably getting pretty thick by now.
