Open letter to America
19 July, 2004 :: 2:09 p.m.
So I've seen Fahrenheith 9/11 as have many other people...as I came out I could see how so many people could jump on the "bash Michael Moore" bandwagon...but I'm not one of them.
Sure, I think he seems to relish too much when he catches someone crying on camera...the camera just seems to hover there on the person's face and you can almost hear him savoring the moment, knowing that it'll tug at hearts of all but the most jaded viewers...but I can overlook that. One of the most popular criticisms of Moore that I've heard is that he's gotten rich off of his biased documentaries and who is he, being rich himself, to bash others who are rich? First off, he wasn't born rich, he knows what it's like to barely scrape by...second of all, at least he's doing something; at least he's opening people's eyes and getting them to think. Was it gimmicky in Bowling for Columbine when he used the kids who had survived the shooting to pressure K-mart into pulling bullets off their shelves? Yes. But the fact that he succeeded probably makes it worthwhile and that one act is probably more than anyone who criticizes him has ever done.
Yes, I hate George W. Bush with a passion and nothing would make me happier than learning of his death so that there's no chance of the morons in this country reelecting him. So I went into the movie biased and wanting to hear anything bad about him that Moore could throw my way. I fully admit that. The thing I love is that while several people in the White House have attacked it as being a bunch of lies and being purely fictional, I have yet to hear anyone actually refute the claims made in the movie with evidence. Hell a couple of the people I've heard bash it said they don't even plan on seeing it (first off, I don't believe that because when you're in an election year you're going to want to know what sort of mud is being slung at you)...and if you haven't seen something, how the hell can you say it's full of lies? My favorite was how the "reporters" on Fox criticized it for supposedly being a documentary but actually being biased. Excuse me? Fox News accusing someone of being biased? Oh right, I forgot...just because they have that wonderful slogan "fair and balanced" they actually are. My mistake.
So anyway, aside from this I'm just fed up with politics in general. I have no faith that change will come with anyone involved in the system right now. I would love to find out how we can just scrap this set of elections coming up and hold them when we have some real candidates instead of trying to decide whether we want to idiot in office now or the douche that's running against him...at least Kerry has Edwards though...he may be a lawyer, but at least he's relatively new to politics and maybe has a sliver of his soul left. And a lawyer is better than Bush and Cheney who come from big business and only care about big business and piss on the rest of us.
I told Erin that I want to take a page from The Boondock Saints, but instead of killing mobsters, I want to kill CEOs.
How long will the sheep continue to graze on barren land before they realize they are starving to death? Walmart is the largest employer in the world and aside from a few long-time associates most are below the poverty line...I'm single and I've been there long enough to finally make over $10/hour...wooo. So I'm making roughly $20,000 before I pay for my health insurance and taxes are taken out...again, wooo. I can't even guess as to how many of the people who work there make less per hour than I do, only get part-time hours (walmart considered 28 hours/week full-time when I started there--Bullshit. I think it might be 32 now, but that's still bullshit...) AND have a kid or two. I don't know how the hell they do it...even the husbands and wives who both work there and have kids...I don't know how they get by. When did it become acceptable for so many in our society to be "working poor?" New York is considering upping the minimum wage to $7/hour...a nice start, but it still sickens me. I'm sick of living in a country that claims the right to set morality for the world but worships at the shrine of the almighty dollar.
Money is a human invention...as all of our parents told us when we were growing up, "money does not grow on trees." Nor does it occur naturally anywhere else. I mean I understand barter; I understand that when resources were slim, there had to be some way to convince those who had to give to those who had not...so you offer something they don't have but do want for something you need...but shit, at least it was pretty metals or animal pelts to keep from freezing or some shit like that...today it's paper and more and more it's not even paper...it's just electronic. You can have thousands of dollars pass through your hands without ever actually touching it...and this we value more than human life? So yes, one minute I'm bitching about not being paid enough and the next I'm bitching that money even exists...I don't want money, but you need it to survive in this world. Ideally I'd love to scrap capitalism completely. Fuck CEOs who buy $6,000 shower curtains and sell hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of stock and then bail out before the company crashes and burns taking all the regular schmo employees with it (gee, George W. Bush comes to mind for some reason...). And most of the time when there's a scandal they hide behind the fact that most of what they did was technically legal. Fuck legal, assholes, was it moral? Why does someone like Bill Gates or any of the Waltons need to be worth billions and continue to collect billions while there are people who make nothing or next to nothing? Fuck money, fuck the stock market, fuck greed. There is a limit to how much you can spend in your life and no person on this earth needs a billion dollars let alone tens of billions...and yet the majority of the people in this country do nothing...we collect our paltry checks which barely get us through to the next one (or don't even come close to making that far) and we accept the fact that there are billionaires and millionaires...and all because they give us this bullshit line that free enterprise gives us all the chance to be one of those people...evaluate your life whether you're 18 or 68 or anywhere in between. When the fuck exactly do you think you'll be making that first million? What exactly are you going to do that amasses you wealth beyond your wildest dreams? I dare say the answer for 99.9% of people who might stumble across this entry is you aren't. We sit back in a rigged game knowing fully that it's rigged and yet we keep playing and we don't say anything about the fact we're being cheated.
What the fuck does any CEO of any company do to deserve the money they're paid? Do they do any of the actual work that makes money for the company? No. They just find ways (even if they're illegal) to keep making more money for themselves and those ways always screw over the workers...bust your ass, do more, more, more...for what? So you can say, "Job well done," and feel a sense of accomplishment and hopefully not notice you're in a shitty, dead-end job for a while later.
I plan to bitch about this longer and louder before too much time passes, but I'm falling asleep in my chair right now...