Have you ever found yourself stuck in rush-hour traffic and wondering if the light—much less your life—would ever change? When you think about it, it doesn’t matter if you’re in the driver’s seat, since you’re always being told where to go. The Ross Perots of life literally bank on us acting like their societal chauffeurs or some other kind of admiring flunkies. Always mimicking their dreams and aspirations, trying to follow their lifestyles and goals; never conceiving our own.
In the same hot pursuit of the all-encompassing dollar, a neo-traditional ritual has grown up that runs roughshod over the grand cattle roundups of yesteryear’s golden days on the ranges. It’s euphemistically called morning and afternoon rush-hour traffic. In the cowboy days, otherwise unthinking and unmanageable beasts were herded up and driven long distances to self-destruction in slaughterhouses to make money for the well-to-do barons of old—leaving a hazy cloud of dust in their wake on the stampede to oblivion.
Today the money-making prize meat is much more mobile, intelligent and normally just two-legged! For miles around we herd ourselves on asphalt trails cramming into towering marketplaces of concrete and glass. Like the cattle barons of old, today’s bosses require our simultaneous presence in workplaces to chum out bewildering profits for their benefit—leaving a hazy cloud of smog in our wake as we come and go...
Humanoid cattle
Yesteryear’s slaughter produced a one-shot profit for the cattle barons. Today’s employment produces profit hundreds of times a year from the same humanoid herd member. On a relentless death-march of hypertension, heart failure, cancer, even AIDS; but for a reason no different from the grand slaughters that made America “great.” And at six feet under, evolution stops. All species are the same—dead meat.
Sitting for hours, day in and day out, in nauseating traffic jams isn’t a mass expression of individual free will, nor is it just a coincidence. It is a compulsion of capital that degrades us into high-tech cattle. Unlike cattle, though, we each have an advanced brain with which to think: and thus the ability to break out of this more sophisticated, but nonetheless induced, herd mentality at any point.
Today’s maverick entrepreneur cowboy-types just don’t know what’s on the other end of the rope. When they do find out, they will drop everything and run for cover (as Ross Perot did in his attempt to lasso the public, on getting what was for him a frightening glimpse, when he said, “.. .1 didn’t want to wreck the political process”). When we move en masse, there will be no stopping us. Not only in the driver’s seat, we will decide where we go and when, at our convenience—also, what we will do when we get there: something no cow ever dreamt of! With democratic control of the earth’s resources replacing control by capital, we can all tell the cowboy bosses to get lost so we can go about our business.
W.J. Lawrimore
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