Afscme Local 444, retired
I have had to listen and watch two ads about what to buy for "the holidays" today. The "holiday's" they are talking about is the day off we get for Christmas. I was lucky as a public sector worker, I got a day and a half. The trade off was I only got a day for new Years. We just got over yesterday's holiday where the candy manufacturers and the media corporations made a lot of money encouraging young children to stuff themselves full of candy for a week or two and for the rest of us to give it to them.
The ad's sales pitches are relentless. We are told our bodies smell unless we buy their deodorant or their other stuff that blocks us from that dirty human habit of sweating. We are too fat, too plain, too short, piss too often, eat too much, don't eat enough, need this car, want that TV, need that mower, desire that man, need that woman. We have excessive baldness, restless leg syndrome, kidney this and lung that. We have ADD, ABC, TWA, ED, PAN AM and many other "syndromes" whose acronyms I can't remember and names I can't pronounce.
We live in a system of a government for the people. Which people? Most of us don't like ads but at peak periods the same ads are every three minutes, sometimes the same ad will be shown twice in succession in case we missed it the first time. When the ad comes on, the technology that was developed with public funds then placed in the hands of the private media companies is used by them to reach in to my home and turn up the volume.
To pass legislation to ban selling me drugs that I have to pester my doctor about for diseases she didn't know existed, is too complicated unlike passing legislation to bail out banks and bankers to the tune of trillions of dollars. In Europe they can't sell prescription drugs like this. To ban the endless ads about prescription drugs for diseases or syndromes like excessive shyness is big government interfering in our lives and a threat to private capital and their precious market. But I can rid myself of the ads if I buy a machine that a manufacturer that is owned through a holding company produces and the holding company is the property of a billionaire(s) named after his daughters.
I am not affected by this though, I just ignore it. It doesn't bother me. I can turn it off. It can't influence me I have a mind of their own. Adults know better, so do children, they buy violent video games because they want to.
I owe social security to corporate power, Medicare to Warren Buffet and Howard Hughes. I have the billionaires and Blackrock and the Carlyle Group to thank for the national and state parks that I enjoy don't I?
Any stress I feel or if I feel overwhelmed by it all it's my fault because I am free. I have free will. I don't need a government telling me what to do. That's communism.
I am confident that the American working class will try to resolve this all and bring its rich, militant and heroic history to the table. Victory isn't guaranteed but please, for f&*$s sake hurry up.
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