Being in the company of young people like this can be quite tiring and even stressful but is also very rewarding. Despite the diversity and racial mix, racism has not the same influence at this point. The kids are also so inquisitive; they rarely hear an English accent and when they guessed where I was from they’re so proud of themselves. I love their honesty. But it’s so different than when I watched kids as a teenager. I was escorting some kids to the water fountain and bathrooms and I lost site of where the water fountains were. A young girl, about 10 said she would hold my hand so I wouldn’t be scared. I immediately felt a little uncomfortable. Kids love hugging and stuff which is so healthy but I thanked her and didn’t do it. I was concerned how it might be perceived; I was after all a stranger in a sense, and a man. I would have thought nothing of it when I was 17 when I use to watch kids. I even went to bed with them, laid down when they went to sleep. You have to be so careful today. And this is freedom. This is “the end of history” according to Fukuyama.
Unlike when I was at school, we don’t get buses that pick us up and take us to the ball game. We have to walk to the subway and then take a train to the ballpark. One woman I mentioned this to asked me if I grew up in a communist society. I thought she was joking but I am not sure. It was a big day for kids with thousands of other youngsters there from schools in the area. It’s an incredible responsibility. They can’t go to the toilet alone. They can’t go to get drinks alone. Just watching them in line is a job, not to mention walking three classes of kids through the streets. There were a few other parents there to help, but it is still a task that takes a lot of attention and responsibility. I have a great respect for teachers.
Most of them take lunches and drinks as the stuff there is so expensive. But after a while I began to get very angry at the vendors. You can see that it is all planned. They know they have thousands of young kids trapped in the stands; kids that can’t venture up to the vendor’s stalls in the mezzanine without an adult, and they were just relentless. For the first hour it was almost impossible to watch the game as the icee vendors kept coming around. These are nothing but cups of ice with some flavoring and they sell for $4 each. Then came the ice cream vendor. Then the Round Table Pizza vendor selling pizza’s at $6.50 a pop; then the cotton candy. Back and forth they went. Kids were standing in their seats, hands raised, calling out to these guys for their wares. Kids that didn’t have money were begging adults or parents for it. At one point I said to a couple of the vendors who came to my aisle barely a minute after one had just left to “please allow us to watch the game: The market is saturated”, I told them. I don’t get angry at them as they are low waged workers facing pressure of their own from the boss but the whole scene is rotten.
The very stadium I was in used to be called the Oakland Coliseum, then some corporation gave them some money and it was called the network Coliseum and now some other corporation gave more money and its called the McAfee Coliseum.
As if I was not angry enough at living in a marketplace, at feeling the increased imposition of the private sector in to public life, I remember when the local paper reported that lobbyists persuaded Congress to amend an 1872 law forbidding advertisements on American currency including postage. So now we will have postage stamps with the Nike Swoosh on them and the McDonalds clown no doubt.
Socialists are optimists. After all, we see an alternative to the present rotten system. But we are also in a minority and that can be difficult. Not only because we are a minority because of our ideas, but because we see more clearly the class oppression, the class divide. I sometimes get angry not only at the bourgeois for their control over society from television to education, but at the fact that they are so powerful here, that they are relatively successful in getting people to not think about it. In other words, while their methods outside of their own nation state may be exceptionally direct and brutal, they have become masters in their home base at obscuring the fact that they are a class force in their own right and with their own separate interests.
And they relentlessly obscure the class issue in politics with religion, gender and race issues. I want to be clear that I am not making light of the special oppression of various groups in society, just the way that this is used to obscure class oppression. Any politicians that attack a millionaire or a business in this country are accused in much of the press of fomenting “class war”. Yet yesterday there were numerous kids with religious shirts on. One girl had a shirt with a picture of a crane lowering objects in to a cage with the figure of a person in it. The words, "Under Construction by God" were prominent and the objects were various human qualities that God was inserting in to the person. I felt a little sorry for her and how this will contribute to all the confusions people have about the world around them.
Obviously, there are limits to this as ideas have a material base and no amount of propaganda can change that, but distractions abound and can be more successful than they should due to the absence in the US of any significant social force that counters bourgeois ideology. During elections the ads on TV are just terrible. The labor leaders naturally support their selected millionaires which adds not only to the confusion but the apathy; the withdrawal of workers from all forms of political life. With no mass leadership in US society offering an alternative to the market, the process of change is slowed.
This withdrawal of workers from political life is actually a reflection of the limits of bourgeois propaganda in that they cannot convince workers of the value of voting for their candidates. So there is much to be positive about and there is definitely a shift in the mood here and we should recognize and welcome it but it’s Ok to get a little angry at the pace sometimes.
1 comment:
Thank you Richard for your very good post. Sean.
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