Though the word is limited to ten letters the concept stretches across generations, countries, and religion. Capitalism sees no laws or borders, it ceases to see humanity, it is reluctant to understand human emotion, and it chooses not to help but to pillage. It paints the world with the only colour it knows – green. It is a concept that is glorified by politicians and business men alike. I guess once you throw a suit on you also make the decision to put your morals aside, the same people who go home to their perfect wife and kids in their perfect house, go to work to take that same dream away from millions of people who live a million miles away. See what capitalism does is it exploits our needs as human beings, as long as the collateral damage is cast aside from the nightly news, as long as free press is put aside by free enterprise, then the machine that has engineered this way of life grows stronger. We live in a society that shudders at a thought bigger than the next sale at their favourite clothing store, a society where if you question the overwhelming complacency you are subjected to a labyrinth of secret prisons and even more secretive interrogation strategies. We live in a world where the biggest war criminal is also the leader of the free world, a world that rewards greed and treats compassion with contempt. Freedom doesn’t exist when others are enslaved; I no longer want to live in a world where the price of freedom is the enslavement and death of others. Though money is a concept just like any other, a thought that can be devalued by any other thought.
Admittedly it is easier to go to sleep at night without thinking that those new jeans you just bought were stitched by the fingers of children in sweatshops that are sponsored by western corporations, and yes it is an unpleasant thought to think that millions of people go to sleep at night dying from diseases we already have the cure for. It is increasingly disturbing to think that we sit idly by as so many suffer, so many struggle, so many are in strife. We need to become people again, we need to shed the shackles of capitalism, and we need to be more than a demographic, more than a statistic. It is a hard concept to grasp at first, but once we start unraveling the scrolls of history we realize that it’s unparallel from anything we’ve ever seen. We see that it is not the iron fist of a republic that has us marching to the beat of their drums, but it is the invisible hand of the free market that guides our thoughts and actions. It is a grim reality but we have to come to terms with it. The dissolving representation of the people in democracy is shocking, and if the free press still existed they would be outraged. But that’s the genius of capitalism, anything you need, you can buy, it all goes to the highest bidder. We surrender our power to politicians who are expected to lie; we put people who are expected to be filled with deceit control the most important thing in the world, our governments.
The brilliance of capitalism doesn’t end with the buying and selling of our governments, its reaches far deeper than that. We’ve managed to put a price on life, liberty, and health. We’ve managed to turn ever facet of our everyday lives into a cash grab. People no longer think of others well being, they think of how lucrative an investment is.
For thousands of years now we have been killing each other mercilessly within the shroud of allegiance, we have even turned the killing of our fellow humans into a business. The business of war is one of the most profitable businesses known to man; in fact the United States is regarded as a war economy. We continue propagating our fellow mans demise. It is impossible to like everybody, or even the majority of people for that matter, but no cause is worth dying for, no human should ever have the power to take another person’s life away. However we keep taking power from the citizens and handing it over to the governments in the name of freedom. But I ask you this, in a world where there are cameras watching your movements, where there are phone companies taping your phone calls, and where there are wars fought, how are you free? If another suffers do we not feel empathy? What makes a life in North America worth more than one in Africa?
It is a hard cycle to break, because we are educated in their schools, from very young ages we are taught to believe in this great democratic system, but belief alone does not make a system work. All the patriotism that can be conjured up at the sight of a flag cannot make the system work. We foolishly believe in the west that history will not repeat itself, that we are somehow different from the rest of the continuum of life That we will some how be absolved of our actions, but its not true, we face the same forces that every other dynasty has faced and we are gripped by the same perils that many a society have been faced with over the years. We live in a society where greed is not only rewarded it is expected. We are placed in concrete prisons in which we are gridlocked and bound. We are a product of social engineering; we have surrendered all the things that make us human, all the things that set us apart from animals. We did it all for the almighty buck. Though individually we retain those qualities, as a whole they are non-existent.
We allow ourselves to be at the mercy of money, we let it control our thoughts and actions. This is not a conscious choice it is one we inherit from our culture, greed is one of our virtues. We live in a world where corporations run healthcare, where a drugs patentability is worth more than the lives that drug could possibly save. An age where we insure our own lives, an age where you could get sued for doing almost anything viewed as politically incorrect. Every country is in debt, so who’s making the money? The people collecting the debts, the international trade houses, the select few who are the descendents, whether through blood or through stock holdings, of those who attended the Jekyll Island meetings. We are merely pawns in their high stakes games.
We are just a fingers slip away from nuclear devestation. The number of countries who have the ability to end the existence of our planet keeps growing. Wouldn’t it all be for naught if we caused our own demise? Isn’t this to much power to give any one or any group of humans?
We live in a world where capitalism rules our universe. We can throw out all the other laws in the world, we only need one. We need not transcribe the present, because the man with the most money will end up telling our story, however misconstrued, misrepresented, and flat our wrong his version is, we will have no choice because that is the power of capitalism. It will be his-story.
