Saturday, August 28, 2004

soon I'll be speaking in acronyms

What could I do? I was just about dead broke. I didn't know where August rent was coming from...

Four weeks ago, I broke down and took a full-time job in corporate america.

Well, where I live you'd hardly call corporate, and where I work (thank the gods of employment) is a far cry from the cubicled halls of america's corporate strongholds. I have done time in those terrifying halls.....

Yet here I am; back in the fold, as it were, bowing in fiscal obeisance to the corporate god, whose credo is Efficiency, Growth, and Profit -- and the greatest of these is Profit -- and whose bastard stepchildren are Waste, Meaninglessness, and Greed. It is a land of marketing slogans reduced to sound bites that are encrypted into acronyms for speedy passage over the internet. It is a land of soulless worker-ants with no personal stake in the goals of the hive beyond their own insignificant piece of the profit pie -- for the vast majority, merely crumbs. It is a single-minded golem that disdains conscience and rewards avarice. It is a plague of locusts. It is a malignant cancer.

I can feel this underlying truth even in the relatively benign small company where I've traded, so far, 20 days of my life for a handful of coin. I work with people whom I feel instinctively are good; people with souls, with dreams and joys. I shudder to think how they will be mangled in the machine....

Where are we going, people? What are we doing to ourselves and our world? Do you know the price you are paying? do you know what you are getting in the exchange? what you are giving up?

There must be a better, higher purpose to which we can put ourselves....