I work on the 24th floor of a high-rise in downtown Minneapolis.
My lunch breaks consist of me, my journal or a book, a couple cigarettes and a bench. Ironically the stench from the sewer grates downtown, even make this Fartimous Rex gag. So each day I sit and stare up at the tall buildings. Sometimes, the wind whistles through the skyscraper canyons. On hot days, it’s very pleasant – outside of the sewer reek.
Today, I took notes in my journal about what I want to say in this blog. As you can probably tell, I’ve been a bit incoherent these last few weeks. So anyway, I’m riding the elevator up with a few building co-workers I didn’t know. The topic of conversation: a security guard who worked in the building about two or three years ago, who had just come back from maternity leave after having twins, took the service elevator to the roof and flung herself over the edge, splattering herself on the 5th street light-rail lines.
That disturbed me.
It wasn’t disturbing that my building had a jumper in its past (what tall high-rise doesn’t), but that a woman who just gave birth to twins, felt that was the only answer.
But later on a break, I sat down in my spot – not before eerily checking out the light-rail area on 5th street – and thought about how a person comes to that decision. I imagine there had to be tremendous emotional pain to cause someone to make that decision, pain that I have never experienced thankfully.
I started thinking about others, mostly the jobless and the middle America struggling to pay their bills with shoulders full of debt. You see Labor Day is coming up – the holiday that celebrates the common worker, the unions, power to the people and all that. But in today’s America, do we the people really have any more power? With our lives tied to our mortgages and the banks, with the loans we get to put our kids through college blindly thinking that it will make a damn bit of difference, will we ever have “power?”
I’m going to steal a stat from a documentary: the top 1% of money-making Americans make more than 95% of the rest of Americans combined.
Interesting, huh?
From where I come from, we call that “out of whack.”
Now you see where I’m coming from. Even if us 95% banded together, we wouldn’t have the money or resources to even make a dent in the top 1%. Kind of makes you want to jump off a building, right?
You see the way I look at it; the top businessmen of the world have played a pretty good strategy. You see they’ve convinced us that our primary concern is to consume. Not to produce, but to consume. They have turned Americans into locusts. Look at the obesity rates. Look at the debt us 95% have racked up buying stuff that we have been convinced we need: iPods, plasma tvs, SUVs, massive houses, jet-skis, home theater systems. And it doesn’t stop at tangible objects. Look at our phones now. We have to have music, games, apps and MY GOD we check our phones every three seconds to see if someone texted us! They’ve even convince us to consumer our own time, our own lives by wasting time on all these things!
And the problem with consumption, of any kind really, is it becomes addicting. And I’ll admit, I’m consuming too much too. I look for those texts, I check email and I have an Xbox 360, which I haven’t played in a month (honest truth). The point is, the big businesses are playing us. It’s all a con. See all these consumables are the distraction. While our minds are busy consuming, their hand is lifting the wallet from our pocket. Sure we don’t feel their hand, because we’re too busy trying to beat Level 30 in Halo 3 to realize we just spent $60 on a video game that will consume 60 hours of time from our lives. And besides the fact that you can’t get that 60 hours back, that’s 60 more hours that we’re not doing what we should be doing – thinking for ourselves, asking the questions that need answers, figuring out just how far we’ve let other people change our lives while we sit in a Thanksgiving-like consuming binge.
I read an article recently, where a computer programmer was writing a program that would essentially glean content from the Internet and actually systematically write news articles (shout out to James Anderson for that link).
Is this how we should really be spending our time? Thinking of new ways to NOT have to do anything?
Thank god the program totally botched the article with inaccuracies – go figure that the information on the Internet was false.
My point to the 95% out there – wake up! We’re the only ones that can actually get ourselves out of this quicksand. As of now, the only power we have is our sheer numbers. Imagine if 95% of America went off the grid: Taco Bells across the nation sitting empty, Best Buy sales people sitting on their asses with nothing to do, cell phone companies with no cell phone calls, gas stations with tumbleweeds rolling between the pumps, malls filled with senior walkers rather than shoppers.
But it’s a vicious cycle isn’t it? If we don’t consume, businesses have no jobs. If businesses have no jobs, we can’t make any money. If we don’t have any money, we 95% can’t consume. Where does it end?
Eventually something will break.
Eventually, the 95% will realize that like piranhas, even though one would find it very hard to take down an elephant, 94 helpers would help make short work out of the task.
So on this Labor Day, I’m going to sit out by the lake and think about when this time will come, and I’ll be glad I’m with the fine folks of the 95%.
