Fwd: Going On Strike

"That, to me, is what Occupy Wall Street is addressing. People don't know exactly what they want, but as one friend of mine put it, they know one thing: F**K THIS S**T! We want something different: a different life, with different values, or at least a chance at different values. [...] But now, I get it. People want to go someplace for at least five minutes where no one is trying to bleed you or sell you something."

To use Taibbi's wording, OWS is about "going on strike from one's own culture".

 

From a Comment on Barry Ritzhold's, Big Picture.  http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2011/11/you-are-the-98/#comments

 

Why would anyone want to go on "strike against one's (our) own culture'? 

 

After all our culture is a manifestation of our American Exceptionalism.  In our exceptional wisdom and demonstrating exceptional discernment with respect to the infrastructure on which our culture is based.

 

Here are my views on why anyone would want to protest against our culture:

 

I define today's culture as one of excessively indulgent and obsessed with cheap materialistic consumerism, indulgent in dietary appetites, and cowardly beyond any generation of Americans in our inability to collectively enforce rules of law, and on  micro level, we are a nation of cheats and scammers.  And we are not even that concerned about our collective direction either.

 

I live in the armpit of the suburban misadventure and misappropriation of our nations assets in a mammoth endeavor to suburbanize and sprawl cookie cutter track homes and strip malls and big box store across the landscape.  Trillion of dollars in the last decade has been squandered on a mode of living, a misadventure, that is both unsustainable as it is socially and spiritually impoverishing.

 

A trip through my community proves my point: strip malls with endless nail salons and fast food and grocery and day care centers.  These underwhelming features are punctuated by office condo's inhabited mostly by doctor offices and ancillary medical business of the great medical industrial complex, more on this in a future post.  Then the big box super stores and big box restaurants where you can get a plate of laboratory designed food stuffs that taste EXACTLY identical whether purchased and consumed in New York, Florida, California, and Washington. 

 

The drove of corporate clone crappy genetically modified-food restaurants give way to 4 Super Stores in a 3 mile radius of my home.  Walmart's, Target's, Ikea's, and more Wal-Marts.  Large telemarketing call centers complete the landscape, where the US corporations indenture the local population, me included, into servitude that they call labor or work.  Those of us that are really fucked up and brainwashed, call it the American Dream.

 

Seems my friends and associates and neighbors and children's friends and their family's, oscillate from retail center to job to school to church and to the doctor's.   It is how we American's express our freedom of choice.  Our profound choices between Walmart Super Center and Target Super Center and Costco Super Center.  Then we get to choose what credit card we wish to enrich with fees, so we can buy our Cheese Doodles. 

 

We American's have amazing freedom of choice when it comes to choosing the medical care we need to get the pills (enormous choice here) we need to keep our cholesterol low while eating hormone and antibiotic packed trans-fat producing food-creatures.  Collectively do we every ask ourselves if the choices have consequences.

 

Our economic choices  are also immense, yet indistinguishable.  As a college graduate, and professionally trained financial professional, I can choose to make 30k per year at any of 8-10 call centers that pay the same, treat employees like cattle on conveyor belt, rolled in to call center customer service or what passes for customer service in today's economy.  Yet these are the fortunate workers--the unfortunate  ones are working for cash under the table with not insurances and they work and sometimes get paid, if they deserve it or not. 

 

After all, it is their choice.

 

Or is it?

 

I don't feel like I have a choice.  I feel like I have fake choices. 

 

It really doesn't matter which TBTF bank I do customer service for, does it?  Does it matter what big box store I patronize?  What institution I deposit my money?

 

Point is, if our choices are fake, our freedom and liberty is fake, and the pillars of the entire charade crumble.

 

The OCW movement is calling attention to the Bie Lie of freedom of choice within a crappy culture.

 

As the commenter says, "people want to go someplace for at least five minutes where minutes where no one is trying to bleed you or sell you something".

 

I too want different values, something different to do on free time, something meaningful to do for work, some public spaces that are not dominated by strip malls and parking lots, places to eat that reflect the amazing ethnic diversity of my community, and a mode of living driven by needs of the community than fueling the corporate overlord that have sold us a crap culture, with the label of Exceptionalism.