By Don Wiltshire
I consider myself to be a fairly mild-mannered person; usually able to find humor or at least able to find an appropriate punch-line to dark or dismal situations. Badda-Boom. Lately, however, I’ve found myself swearing at the “feel-good” ads on TV that BP has been releasing. It’s uncontrollable and growing more inclusive of other corporate ads.
I’ve managed to self-diagnose my condition thanks to Google and have coined a handy label for my affliction: Corporate Coprolalia Syndrome. There, I feel better already. Coprolalia, from the Greek copro- (dung) + -lalia (chatter, babbling), is found in about 15% of the people who suffer from Tourette’s syndrome. Not to make light of TS which affects about 1 in 100 people, it is an inherited neuropsychiatric disorder with onset in childhood, characterized by multiple physical (motor) tics and at least one vocal (phonic) tic. More information can be found at the Tourette Syndrome Association (TSA) home page at www.tsa-usa.org.
And just what brought about this condition in me? I’m fairly sure it was BP CEO, Tony Hayward’s audacious, self-serving comment: “I’d like my life back.” This is not an isolated incident but is now symptomatic of most corporate behavior. Here then is a short rant that I started at the onset of my “condition”:
The great multinational corporations of this Great Earth have adopted the battle cry of the 2008 democratic campaign: “Yes We Can!”
We can behave in any manner we like, as long as our profit margin, our stock prices and our CEO’s salaries are soaring. Yes We Can.
We can lay off loyal workers, out-source jobs and set up our sweat shops in the poorest of the poor countries. Yes We Can.
We can trash our environment, externalize costs and ignore toxic clean-ups and all of those nasty government regulations. Yes We Can
We can call all of the shots now, because we control all of the government: the executive, the judicial and the congressional branches. Those few politicians who we don’t directly control will do our bidding just because they own large chunks of our stock. Yes We Can.
We can now control the lives of all citizens from cradle to grave in order to increase our “bottom line.” Yes We Can.
We can decide who is born in a hospital with all of the best medical equipment and who gets born in a back ally. We will decide who gets what medical procedure and medication as long as it results in the largest possible return to us. We will continue to lobby congress to rewrite the health care for all bill as long as we get to decide who “all” is. Yes We Can.
We decide who gets an education and what you will learn, as long as it instills loyalty, obedience and cooperation in our work force. Yes We Can.
We will decide what you will eat as long as it includes mass produced food items, fillers and additives from companies that we control and can profit from. We will grow the meat you eat, the milk you drink and the eggs you buy in the most profitable manner possible without regard to the conditions that our expendable animals are kept in. Yes We Can.
We decide, upon your passing, who gets entombed in glory and who gets sent off to the methane recovery plant. Yes We Can.
In our last bi-weekly Water meeting, Cheryl Hastings presented a jewel of a lecture by Vandana Shiva. Vandana is outraged that a corporation is trying to privatize the Sacred River Ganges for profit. Seems as though she is suffering from a touch of CCS herself.
Next Wednesday, July 28, 7 p.m. at the Magdalena Public Library, I will be leading a discussion of Craig Childs’ book The Secret Knowledge of Water. This is a strange little book that alludes to water as having a “mind of its own.” We will delve into some of these strange properties of water, its composition, its “wetness” and its life giving and destructive properties. Only then, can we begin to understand why the author puts his own life at risk just to see how water behaves.
We started to paint our collection of water jugs red because that seemed to represent the real danger of losing our water supply. They were beginning to look rather, well, dangerous. A scattering of a few white and blue jugs in with the lot, makes it a tad more patriotic and representative of US.
If you have any comments, problems, solutions, upcoming events or Empty Milk Jugs, contact me at mtn_don@yahoo.com.
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