The New Infidelity

I’m not talking about the infidelity that has been around for thousand of years. Cheating on your wife, your partner or your friends is not what this is about. The infidelity of the modern age is more related to the non-Islam western individual as being an infidel. But it goes deeper than that. From the day I could see and laid my eyes on my first billboard, I knew there was a problem. What the hell is that and why are they telling me this. Advertising had hit my brain in the wrong place. I wasn’t born a capitalist. It’s kind of like being born gay only in reverse. It wasn’t until a few years later that I realized that people were trying to make money by exposing me to their crap.

Years later it has come to mean that I am positively on the wrong side of the fence and I have been labeled with a new much more meaningless term, a consumer. I am now a pig in the pigpen of cheap products that I am told to buy on a 24 hour basis. Besides that there are cultures in the word that hate me for doing so. I had nothing to do with this. It is even made more permanent by the words of our completely fearless leader after 911, “There is nothing to fear, just keep shopping”. It’s the FDR speech taken to another level.

I’m in it and I can’t do anything about it. But in the process of being dumbed down and at the same time becoming more aware, I notice things. Like the television news has nothing to say to me. It is being broadcast to someone else. I could care less where Google shares are going because I wouldn’t be able to afford more than ten shares and it would take me 5 years to cover the brokerage fee. I am not interested in all the violence because that’s not me.

For instance how about one country wanting to invade another because they are telling the world they are a threat to peace but really all they want to do is rip off their stuff. I am not violent although I fear I might be heading in that direction. Supposedly it is my lot in life to buy cheap junk that is made by people who are treated like slaves so certain people can make huge profits just as long as I buy or consume is the better word. Is this what capitalism is all about?

All these thousands of years of human evolution and its come all the way down to this? It’s very possible there is a meltdown on the way because capitalism for all its basic business ideals is nothing more than all out greed. The few hundred or thousand who have all the toys must be planning to leave this planet to go plunder another one and just leave the rest of us here to die of thirst, hunger and overheating. That’s what all that space exploration is really all about.

There is no way it’s about the exploring spirit of man because the truth is, there no money in it. So what now? As a designated gobbler on the food chain of greed, I just refuse to buy. Don’t get me wrong, there are things you buy because you need them or they just happen to make your little life better. But there is no need to spend your precious time away from that other popular pastime called work to spend it buying useless and unwanted junk. Thirty minutes in a mall and I want to start shooting. Not people but merchandise hoping that it might make a good difference to some poor soul who drew the short lot.

If we all stop buying blindly, it might just break the chain. It might cause suffering but it might just get rid the invisible demon robber barons that are destroying this planet with all the life on it included. We don’t even have to dump capitalism if that’s the best methodology we can come up with. It just needs better guidelines so that it is steered in the direction that can make this fishbowl we live in called earth a better place for everyone. That is what true humanity is supposed to be about.