"Drink juice and smash the state - now that's the real thing!"
- David Rovics
While watching Fast Food Nation, our sick cycle of blind consumerism was again apparent. Without a thought as to how this cycle is sustained, we ignorantly live out our lives. Blind too are we to the misery each of us are in - until one day we awaken with an unexplained emptiness inside.
This Matrix-like world-within-a-world - smiling faces selling cheap, clean products without a thought about who or what has been exploited or murdered to grease the gears of this machine - really does exist, is all around us, and does everything to perpetuate itself, unnoticed.
Today, the molding hands of our society belong to chiefs - whether of the Executive Officer or "Commander and" sort - setting the rules, making the laws, and selling us our emotions, identities, and ways of life. We have been fed this line since birth - is there any wonder that we do not see, let alone question? Awaken now, to the world of the real!
--#--
Walking to the convenience store with my partner at night - forced to patronize Circle K because I cannot afford a vehicle, and lack of independent alternatives - I pull the $2.00 from my pocket. Thirsty, I know I am going to have to buy a gallon of Tampico for $1.59 (plus tax). I would prefer juice, but cannot remember when last I could afford it.
Of course, I could purchase a tiny juice or soda, but with as much as I drink, being vegan, and trying to eat healthy, Tampico is really the only option. No, Tampico is not healthy, but at least it's not carbonated.
Just my luck: there is no Tampico, but the name-brand equivalent, Sunny D, is the same price - albeit for half the size.
We spend the remaining change on a gallon of water. To pay for water - the insanity! Only being able to afford an artificially flavored representation of juice is worse. To borrow from Dave Chappelle: orange drink, not orange juice. Who really knows what "neotame," "sodium hexametaphosphate," or "yellow #5" is, anyway? Definitely not the average consumer. I am sick of having to Wiki the mile long ingredient list of everything I buy and never getting a straight answer!
As in the scene in Fast Food Nation where the McDonald's knockoff manufactures the smell and taste of their burgers, we have degraded or expended everything in society, and can settle now only for substandard representations. How many millions of research dollars were spent to make Sunny D approximate the taste of an orange?! Regardless, Sunny D always leaves my mouth with a suspicious tingle...
The juice that I buy is not organic, on the rare occasion I can afford to buy juice; I definitely cannot afford organic. What I have to settle for is most likely pesticide-laden and genetically modified, grown in countries where pesticides outlawed in the United States are still legal; where the rights of humans are dubious, let alone workers; that has been shipped thousands of miles to finally end up at some corporate mega-mart.
We still call this god-forsaken capital of "western civilization" the land of the free, yet I am not free enough to choose to drink juice from a real orange. I do not make enough money, despite being of white, male privilege. What of the migrant workers, women, workers of color, and millions of others "below" me in this racist, sexist, society?
Every time I buy anything, I buy into the blood-profit system, and there is nothing I can do about it. "All money is blood money," rings true indeed, when looking at the origin and destination of our funds. One could modify it to read, "All labor is blood labor!"
This fast food nation is no way of life! End this capitalist system! End the profit from hunger! End the exploitation of animals, of workers, of ourselves! I say, orange juice for all!
--#--
Charles Imboden opposes profit from hunger and argues that food should be free for all that are hungry. He is currently compiling an archive of anarchist-communist thought and can be reached via email at cimboden[at]thenuclearsummer[dot]com.
Discuss | Posted: 2008.03.08
