Neighbors over Corporations

I have said several times lately that I am not so much an advocate of small business against big business but real people versus dead bodies called corporations.

We have so much sympathy for corporations! They call, we hear the voice of our neighbor, “You have to understand. The underwriters need a blood test. They have to make sure you have no pre-existing conditions. They need to make money off of you,” by invading our veins. We listen to careful talking points crafted by psychologists to elicit our sense of justice and turn it profitable and sterile. We are understanding of Amazon, of the NFL, of the power company, as they shut off our power if we send a check printed off our home printer instead of the special ink that you get from corporations.

Meanwhile, our neighbor is absolutely exhausted. He shows up at church on Sunday, missed it last week, and we ask him where he has been. He gets sick, we wonder if he is lying about it. Perhaps he talked himself into sickness; he’s a little negative most of the time anyways. He misses an e-mail, we wonder if he’s conspiring to replace us.

Our money goes to corporations. We give to some “charity” “organization”, not practicing the virtue ourselves but outsourcing it, until we have no ability to understand people and what they need. We are skeptical of the man we know that says he’s struggling, but the corporations retain most of what we give them, and the rest is spent on birth control. We wonder if our neighbor is lazy. If he is, no matter that he makes $3000 a month working 40 hours a week, if we give him $300, we feel he has wasted our money. Worse, we think we are responsible for making him lazy. Did he really need the $300? We spend much time thinking about it, before, after, all during our life, and we finally come up with the fruit: I shouldn’t be giving money to people anyways. I already give to church. By church, we mean some group with some name that the church supports. Our neighbor calls that group, needing help with his electric bill, and they tell him to call United Way. He goes to a food bank; we call Child Protective Services and tell them about it, like the secret police.

We don’t favor our neighbor’s attempts to make money. He risks everything, quits his job, tries to make a better life for our family, and we wait to see how he does. We will spend many thousands of dollars every month ordering exotic luxuries from other countries over seas, but we will not spend a hundred dollar’s at a friend goatmilk soap business, or thirty-five dollars on a friend’s book. That is so expensive! The prices are high! He spent a year writing a book, and we will not give two hours wages to him to encourage him. He gives it to us for free, and we will not spend an hour reading it. Many hours watching Fox News, many hours listening to somebody on Youtube with five million subscribers, but not a minute on the fruit of our neighbor’s heart.

This is a philosophy and an approach that seems insignificant to most people and nice to the rest. But this is the entire mechanism of our slavery. I know that our neighbor is less reliable, less pleasant, and more dangerous than a corporation. They will punish us for trying to support them. So we treat him as worse than a dead body, and we inspire him to imitate the corporations. He kills his soul to please us, never taking rest, and we still criticize him.

This is the end of the article.