The "C" Word

The C word, there it sits, bloated and yet still stuffing its fat face with time, resources and people from all over the world. If there were a rallying cry of capitalism it would go something like this “all for me and none for some!” and of course there is no shame in that because we work hard to get what we have and if anyone else wants a piece of it all they have to do is work as hard as we have.

After driving through the Navajo Native reservation we sat down with some people and expressed our dismay of how these people are living. There are cardboard and tarp shacks, there is no electricity, no grocery stores, no anything for miles and miles and miles, the reservation is a desolate wasteland. The response of the people we were sitting with? “They like that way.” This is a good place to insert my favorite expression, SERIOUSLY!? No one wants to live that way! No one wants to live in a tar paper shack with nothing, no one wants to go hungry, no one wants to see their children not clothed or fed, everyone wants a good comfortable life with opportunities for them and their children. Now there is a big difference in how people view comfort and “plenty” a good example would be our India team talking to someone in India who told them that in heaven they would be happy because they would not even have to haul their own wood. Good grief! Me in my little tiny cabin in the north woods of MN where I do haul my wood am practically living in “heaven” for them! I could turn on an electric heater, I could move if I want to, I could get a job, my husband has the opportunity to attend school and learn a new trade, the choices that I have are so varied.

Since I took off on a rabbit trail there let’s get back to the original topic. Capitalism. I am paying over $1.60 for gas in the dead of winter. Just so that the oil companies can jack the price up to pushing $4 a gallon this summer, why? Capitalizing. We have to buy gas, we don’t have options for public transportation even if we did who would actually use them because I hear a long litany of complaints already, “it’s too slow, I have to wait, it’s too crowded, I don’t like the kind of people who use public transit” and blah blah blah blah blah. Plus who wants to put on the same level as the rest of everybody? If we are all standing waiting for some sort of public transportation how are we going to know who is working at an office and who manages Burger King?

We are one of the only countries with military bases all over the world. We like to capitalize on our “peace keeping” missions and go ahead and plop a base down. Now we don’t actually want to take care of the country we are in, we just want to keep an eye on things. And! If anyone dares to not “share” their wealth then KAH BAM! we are going to slap a trade embargo on them just as a little slap on the hand and reminder of who is really in control. Now if you are really out of control and a trade embargo just doesn’t cut it then we are just going to have to send someone to assassinate your president (dictator, ruler, whatever), sorry, it just had to be done for the greater good, gotta knock that Axis of Evil ya know. C stand for another word that goes well with capitalism, crush. Capitalism reminds me of a machine with large metal teeth, moving forward on big metal tracks, it rolls over all opposition that it can not grind up swallow and (excuse my language) crap out as something useful for its drivers to consume.

I was trying to plug my ears last night as my mom did a break down of Avatar, first off we all really enjoyed the movie, it was entertaining and visually stunning and had a good story, so we were all discussing the different angles of this moving when my mom suddenly puked out the horrible reality of the story because this is how Avatar would really end in Capital world: The men go back home with their butts kicked they get more men, more guns and more money because while they have been getting their tails kicked there has been none of that rock stuff being mined so consequently it has shot up on the market because there isn’t any available. The men with guns and money return and they round everyone up and put them on reservations, they then destroy the special tree and proceed to mine their rock. The End.
I wanted to act like a little kid and plug my ears and say “NAH NAH NAH”, I told my mom that I didn’t want to know what would actually happen, I wanted to keep the warm fuzzy the-movie-ended-perfectly feeling and that is destroyed by actually thinking about the warm fuzzy ending that wouldn’t even exist, ok so neither do the blue people but you get my point.

Seriously…

And here we are thinking that we are so much better than the other big C (Communism) because everyone knows that we won the cold war definitively when we landed on the moon. So really we have greater scientific minds, we know how to “utilize” every opportunity to it’s fullest and we have more nukes, beat that!

The End.