There's nothing wrong with you--- the workplace is unhealthy.

I think it was Mumia Abu Jamal who said, "people say you're crazy to fight the system but you'd have to be crazy not to."  There's never a truer phrase.  We are all different of course and our method of resistance might be.  Palestinians staying in their homes despite being terrorized daily in an effort to get them to "voluntarily" leave them is resistance.  So is a strike or occupation or armed struggle.

I think the first step in resistance is recognizing you are have an oppressor.  I mean recognizing it consciously as opposed to feeling it and accepting it as the norm or a product of your own weakness or some supernatural force. Once you recognize it and get angry about it you can do something.

There are millions of little ways that are examples of our opression in a society that is a very unhealthy one for humans.  For example, how free can we be when we are trying to watch television, a movie or something we like, and every five minutes the owners of this technology try to sell us something. Not only that, they use all sorts of nasty psychology with actors appealing to us on all sorts of levels to buy this product because we need it, our lives will be better, we'll be happier human beings and more successful at that.

But worse than the ads themselves is that some force enters our private space and turns up the volume.  I have tried to see this procedure in action but it seems invisible.  But it does happen, I am not imagining it.  My volume goes up without my permission and against my wishes. Now, I know who does this and why. And I know that acting individually I have no power to stop it.  But I know that it can be stopped and that collective action is part of that process.  It makes me angry this happens which is good.

There's something else.  I walked in to Rite Aid yesterday to buy some cough medicine and as I walked through the front door, the checker who was tending to someone behind the counter to my left says "Welcome to Rite Aid".  She had to turn to her right to say it as she is not an "official" greeter and actually has her back to the front doors.

I had passed so I didn't really engage and I'm already angry because I know why she does it.  But I hear twice more, "Welcome to Rite Aid" Welcome to Right Aid" as two other customers come through the doors behind me.She hasn't always had to do this but it is company policy now obviously.  It's like the Safeway clerk's standard response to the question "Do you know which aisle the Brylcreem is on?"  "Aisle 11.  Do you want me to show you?"

This seems harmless enough but it is vile. Human beings are naturally gregarious creatures.  Under healthy conditions we ask how someone is doing or welcome them to a place or ask them if we can show them where this or that might be; we don't have to be coerced in to it or have to do it under the threat of force. But the boss forces us to say these things in the workplace where we are trapped in an exploitive, oppressive relationship with them. It is part of their strategy to increase productivity and win market share from their rivals.  So as they take from the worker Labor power they don't pay for and continues to find ways to extract more and more for less and under more grueling conditions, one of their marketing strategies is to force workers to do what normally comes natural to us with the aim of making them richer.

We may not express this but we know it's garbage.

What ruthless bastards they are and what a rotten anti-social system of production capitalism is. Freedom it is not.  Fighting back in one way or another makes you healthier; accepting this as the norm is what makes us sick.  Not to resist this set up will surely make you crazy.