It’s pretty late. Jenn left a while ago, and I promised myself to be in bed before the clock struck midnight. Well, I’m in bed, but sleeping….not quite yet. First of all, this is the only time I can get some recreational emailing and stuff done, but I also have to spill some shit.
I’m officially a class warrior. I know this about myself. I don’t like it. For those of you who don’t know, class warrior is the general term given those people of the leftist persuasion who blame everything on the upper or middle classes and attempt to frame everything associated with them as bad. I try to avoid this. I seriously do. But there are times when you just get overwhelmed and all you can see is the 21 year old driving their Escalade to college, smoking while they walk to class, wearing too much makeup/cologne/perfume/hair product, dressing in clothes that cost more than some people make in a year, and you just want to scream. I will be the first to admit that I have some actions that I am not the proudest of. I love shoes. Straight up. I enjoy buying and looking at them. I also like to have an assortment of clothes so I don’t look like I am recycling the same thing every week. However, there are boundaries there. I am aware of the fact that I can’t own a million pairs of shoes, because it’s not socially responsible. It only hurts society if I have 4 pairs of sneaks while there are 3 people in the world who don’t have any at all. There is an obvious problem. From my experience, those people with the least realization of this are, sadly, those with larger amounts of money at their disposable.
This isn’t to say that there is a magical equation that says money = asshole. It is sadly a generalization that has held true so many times in life that it’s hard to see that it is just that, a generalization. And I’ll be frank (you be bob). I hate this about myself. I really cannot stand it. People always talk about improving themselves, blah blah blah, but if there were one thing that I could truly change it would be this unfair (albeit grounded in experience) snap judgment that I often perform. How lame is it to do this? Pretty fucking lame.
Why is it lame? That’s a bigger question. It’s lame for the same reasons that “hating” corporations is lame. It’s lame because the problem isn’t rich people or corporations or Phil Knight, the problem is the system that not only creates these entities, but also encourages their creation. Something that “progressives” (oh, how I loathe that term) always speak to is solving the sickness, not the symptoms. It comes from a medical background, where you would obviously not just give someone cough medicine if they have emphysema. While that would hopefully take away their immediate pain (the coughing), it wouldn’t help to cure the problem that really ails them - that being a degenerative lung disease that is slowly killing them. In turn, it’s not fair to speak to “killing the rich” or “toppling the corporations”, because that only solves a small problem in the here and now. The real problem is the larger economic and social system within which these people and entities exist.
We labor in a socioeconomic system and structure that demands not understanding and compassion for those around us, but rather a cost-benefit analysis of every person in and out of our lives. Nor does this system require a consideration of others while making decisions that most certainly will impact others. We see attempts to stem this, the easiest to think of being “Don’t drink and drive”, placing the priority not on your own welfare, but on the fact that you are endangering others by engaging in such an action. However, on a societal level, the “do first, ask later” mentality permeates every action we take. Whether it be honking your horn and flipping off the asshole that cut you off, being the asshole that just cut someone off, locating a trash incinerator in a poor neighborhood, driving an SUV that could house a village, or throwing that cigarette butt on the ground, we are so disconnected from a sense of social responsibility and respect that not only do these things seem natural, but they also seem beyond reproach by those of us who seek to create a more balanced society.
And let’s face it, those of us who are fighting against this aren’t doing a great job of it. Normally these ideas are housed within such wishy-washy concepts of “Peace, Love, Unity and Respect” coupled with a haze of mind altering substances that it’s just not palatable to the average person. Hell, I’m not the average person, and I get upset with people who tell me to love everyone. I don’t love everyone. I know this. I know I can never do this. There are people on this earth who have given me reason not to love them. They’ve given me reason not to like them.
But they have not given me reason not to respect them and their right to exist. This is where the crux of a “moral” society lies. It’s not in universal love or universal acceptance of a single laundry list of beliefs. It lies in the acceptance of one single doctrine.
Respect.
Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding spelled it out for us, and we have yet to find out what it really means. All of our actions seeking to regulate and enforce regulations that force corporations and people to treat each other with a modicum of respect are nice, but they miss the mark. It’s obvious that such infrastructure is needed, but isn’t it really a mass change of the people that is more important? And more effective? Shouldn’t we be seeking to educate those who truly hold the power in society? Especially in a democratic society, those people are the everyday citizens, the laborers and unskilled workers. These are the people that are not receiving respect, but need it the most. Our young and old alike are being ignored and skipped in our decision making process. The poor and hungry, those who need attention the most aren’t even considered because, quite frankly, they don’t matter in our society. We view them as a “necessary evil” of this system that gives us such profound wealth and culture. Well quite frankly, I can’t share the belief that it is necessary for any one person to starve just to make sure I have a nice pair of shoes and some pretty pictures to look at. The underclass in the way we have constructed it in modern society is not only not a necessity, but it is not a real existence. We need to move towards a sense of multilateral respect, of people, of beliefs, of thoughts and ideas, of animals and plants, of our Earth (capital E) as a whole, and possibly most importantly, of ourselves.
But anyways. I got off ranting and raving. I am not saying that I excel at any of these ideals that I have put forth. I always fall short of the high standards I set forth. However, it is better to try and fail than to never have tried at all. I believe it was Shakespeare who asked something similar about love. The real question is whether or not at the end of the day, when the sun has gone down, have you made a difference that day, no matter how small or how large, and has that difference been for the good of everyone, not just yourself and is making that difference, while maybe not winning the overall struggle, enough for you?
And when I ask myself, and people tell me that I’m not really fixing anything, I instinctively recite some lyrics in my head.
You tell me that I make no difference
At least I’m fucking trying
What the fuck have you done?
justinª