Push-button gratification is no better than trigger-pulling for solving real societal dilemmas. They always require the same thing, the one thing nobody wants to hear because perpetually is hard work widely regarded as feasible only with possibly lucrative incentives. Earn that love, don’t sell me on a jingle.
Telling people what they want to hear isn’t a kindness, it’s duplicity. It’s why I think social marketing experts are con-artists and it’s why I can never give any career politician the time of day. I’ve lost media gigs and supposed friendships over writing negative reviews. I believe sharing in a society demands a lot more pretending than people are willing to admit to. The normalcy of its prevalence doesn’t explain away the breach in ethics. I’ve wondered if any of my past job interviewers later killed themselves. Or at least became alcoholics. Somewhere on this pathway of mass-marketing doing the thinking on society’s behalf, we began equating honesty with cruelty. If you lack brand loyalty there’s something wrong with you, rather than those so easily sold. If you won’t cater to my ego you’re infringing my rights. Etc.
This won’t be popular, but the most unrecognized bias are sweeping statements. All Russians are always evil, all women are perfect and all men are dogs, all white people are racist. None of it is true. Anyone can be anything, especially exceptions. Stereotyping is lazy branding. And it’s all very much a superiority thing, contingent on the detriment of a different brand sight unseen. I can’t say all women are perfect because I have never met with every woman in existence. The world overflows with fucked up trash, but being presumptuous only further divides it.
And Americans of all people should know better than to presume that a majority is representative of the whole. Even without the pandemic I wouldn’t let Joe Biden or Donald Trump inside my home and certainly no closer than spitting distance. I am a completely horrible person but not by using or abusing anyone, ever, and not by freely handing away my trust, not my principles or my convictions. Yes, obviously too many people unknowingly or not milk white privilege in their own lives, but it didn’t help me when a uniformed cop urinated on me while I was sleeping in a car-park in Worcester way back in the dead of a fucking winter. Power can and will be misused by anybody. The insistence for free, good publicity to the contrary is at once the omission of some inconvenience.
I think when we have a society that not only indulges ego but proactively rewards it, persons get empowered to feel that any plea of empathy for others is somehow violating their own rights, as to do so fails to embrace the supremacy of their ego, diverts attentions away from said ego. And it must be obvious by this day and age that ego’s fetishes and one’s perceived rights are now indistinguishable. Everyone gives racists miles to white-splain or man-splain what they consider is *not* racist, but nobody anywhere ever thinks to ask them to define what they would consider *is*. I think there’s a clear reason for that, my being a white guy aside. Like, alrighty President Trump, if border walls and travel bans are not xenophobic, could you kindly explain to the public in your own words what does qualify, so we might all know for future reference. Fucker would gnaw his tongue off on camera. Now imagine the peetape starred a white girl.
All the more ironic (and stupid) when even corporations never seriously believe the customer’s always right. If that were so customers would be enabled to decide things for themselves, like canceling lefty James Gunn and right-wing Roseanne rather than allowing audiences a vote, or any say in the matter at all. We need a mass humbling. To realize diva mentality approaches life no differently than do the Trumps of the world, and that as long as we’re all here together then nobody is the star. We aren’t so special, and I suspect most social anxiety is nature trying to remind us to that end.
I’ve faced reverse discrimination more than a few times, and where many feel compelled to accept it as taking one for the team, I view it as no more rational than traditional discrimination. Having no college degree and missing half my teeth from years of the drinking and fighting which desperation brings did me in faaar more often, but I still had options, sure. Yet those options were by no means due to the color of my skin, but my singular persistence which no brand may ever take blame or credit for. I dug my own graves by considering that any employer could function without paying late and/or paying less than agreed or reneging from payment altogether. And I relentlessly pulled myself back out of those graves on my own, as proper channels are fucking useless even in a slow news week, for I embrace no branding or persuasion with which to garner favor, garner preferential treatment or just desserts either one.
I could not afford the costs of the charade even if I wanted to.
Matters such as reverse discrimination are charades as well, accomplishing only the perpetuation of a different stereotype, one where bias towards skin tone, gender or sexual preference is the only roadblock to opportunity. It will never explain the millions more for whom these characteristics are not the factor holding them back from meeting and surpassing the standards of whichever marketed status quo. Those sold on the pipe-dream that they too shall someday find riches are the only persons who cannot or will not see this for what it is. It’s the system itself, ego-driven for Capitalistic exploitation and extortion. The less egocentric you are, the more you will be made to suffer for it. Life should neither be taken as a game, a contest or a race. The stresses real and imagined coming from these everyday struggles need only apply if you give measure to those standards of quote unquote status quo. Job creators are still at liberty to pay late and/or less than agreed or to renege on payment altogether, thus entitling you to years of the drinking and fighting which desperation brings because ego-centrism does not service anybody but psychopaths.
My maternal family tree is so big, local news has filmed certain of the turkey days. So many black sheep we had our own table, the half-black cousins, half-Pakistani cousins and half-Norwegian cousins. And me and my older sister, too ethically-oriented to go white-bread and ostracized by the family for it. How dare I remained poor, not weaponizing my will across the world at large. How dare I not use my wit to own 5 houses, and claim for my own the sweetest ass in all the lands as though life might serve no other purpose or hold no other potential, but whetting my whistle. How dare I read their scripture rather than stand on the book to appear that much taller. I only tuck my shirts in for funerals. I would never call myself woke, but I’ve always liked to read. And as such, I feel what made Martin Luther King Jr go too far in Uncle Sam’s eyes was not his efforts toward racial equality, as regardless of its necessity that alone would not be enough to turn the tides of subjugation. It was his Poor Peoples campaigning near the end. God forbid everybody share stories about the common denominator dividing us one and all down to the gutters. This society is explicitly structured to assure the masses unifying against the self-proclaimed royals never can happen. I have never in my life been willing to play the game, or even to pretend to for the sake of bupkiss appearances. And likewise are these social networks non-figuratively vessels for DIY segregation in an exponentially magnified way. More so with ideologies, which do provide the tangible roots for all bias. Here we can mimic the feudal lords dictating our lives in reality, free to surround ourselves only with those we wish to be, to befriend or to fuck and no other voices need concern us. We can attempt to make it a good experience, but it still trusts power in the “right” hands, when power corrupts by design. These online experiences inevitably reaffirm and strengthen our respective egos whether we mean for them to or not.
Yet all the while, it is never ourselves receiving the actual empowerment at day’s end, no matter how pretty the jingles. Only our divisive masks get the flattery, not our incisive souls.