With respect,
Good Morning Everyone,
The day has opened with coffee and talk of our on-going Monopoly game. K and I are even at 1 - 1. In our current game I am in the poor house and she is Miss Moneybags. Life seems to be like that. One minute we are up, the next, down. These games have invited us to consider capitalism. Clearly, the one thing Marx never counted on was it's ability to morph. Or its power to seduce people. In the day when Monopoly was invented railroads were king, oil companies were apparently not so up there on the list of properties, and communications companies were in their infancy. What makes Monopoly, like real life, tolerable is hope that in the next throw of the dice, our fortunes will change...and capitalism hints at this everyday. When we aren't being distracted by football, basketball, or the latest reality show, we are deep in the delusion that we will be the next Donald. Or at least, we might find a better job, make a bit more money, or buy our way into bliss at Wal-Mart. There is hope. But you see, this is what makes hope a toxic handmaiden to capitalism. It keeps us out of reality and living in a dream. I say, enough.
I know, I know...we think hope is essential, it keeps us going, yes, yes. I say this might be true of a realistic hope, but the sort of thing we get stuffed into our heads from childhood onward is Hallmark greeting card crap. Unrealistic, American Dream Hope deludes us. While it might offer us a direction to move toward, we must be very careful not to allow it to be unrealistic or act as a bromide to ease our suffering. More importantly, such hope inhibits our willingness to actually change the system, as we fear changing the system may destroy our chances at success and this is the hook capitalists have used for decades all the while getting richer as we become poorer. I say, enough.
My thoughts are these: in order for abundant good to be created for all, we each need to take ourselves by the hand and get our butts off the sofa. We must care for the other guy as much as we might care for ourselves. We must care that if the playing field of life is not fair, we are all made aware of this fact. We need to disallow that 1% its opportunity to cloud our judgement by teasing us with some dream or another. TV is a drug or, as Harlen Ellison called it decades ago, a glass teat. We need to quit sucking on it. We need to face our lives and our society and see it clearly without the dross or tinsel of an unrealistic hope. Things will not get better by themselves and if we ourselves do not define better we leave it to others, that 1%, to define better for us. I do not believe they have our best interest at heart. While Monopoly comes and goes with the roll of the dice, our lives do not depend on chance unless we abdicate our own responsibility in making our lives ours. As the existentialists say, our choices define us. I say, enough.
The view from the top of that 100 foot pole is clear, we simply step off.
Be well.