In the late 1800s, workers in many industrialized countries began to organize to better their terrible working conditions. They were able to organize because of the very thing that gave them their terrible working and living conditions; the factory. It was a new concept born in the efficiency-driven gilded-age mindset of that time. The Unions were able to change a great deal. Not everything; there were compromises made. But where they left off, we can continue.
This world needs a new kind of Union.
Let the history textbooks fifty years from now read thus; That in this new millennium, with it’s consumer culture that supposedly sedated America, this sleeping giant arose again; That the consumers, lead by the youth, organized to better their own lives, countries, and world; that they used the very things that bound them to their circumstances, the internet and all their electronic communications, to organize themselves into a fierce consumerist economic-political machine; That in this decade, century, and millennium the masters became the servants, the new surged past the old, and the Youth were the ones to teach their elders.
Welcome to the United Youth of America.
For these sixteen years of my life, I’ve slowly come to appreciate the extent of the middle-class bubble; blotting out with shining opacity the hardships of the less-well-to-do, the consequences of my own material affluence, what was being stolen not just from the faceless ‘them’, but from myself; in fact, everything else. It took so long just to see beyond that comfortable bubble.
Above all, suburban life is the precipitation of isolation; suffering of constant lack of perspective, contrived standards, monochrome culture. It is the logical conclusion of the American Dream: endless rows of prefabricated houses where wilderness and community once stood, rented mansions and identical delusions of grandeur, self-justifying collective unconsciousness that forms the basis for the various degrees of stock-market, pseudo-individualistic, evangelical race-nationalist mentalities termed “normal” “politics”- milder versions, “liberal”; more honest ones, “conservative”.
And yet, in the midst of all this, I still managed to take some important steps. As a child, I took on vegetarianism, connecting cruel slaughter to the manufactured carcass I was expected to consume every night at the prescribed time. Utter disgust and recognition of hypocrisy began the undoing of my conditioning. From there, I began to reject the more extraneous aspects of religion, opening the door for further questions regarding the validity and applicability of any sort of religion itself; soon, I would apply the same kind of reasoning to the capitalism and nationalism I had already deemed “necessary evils”, at best, for so many years.
But I’m still not free. Not yet. And I know I never will be, not until everyone else is of this utter insanity we call a society. So until then, I not only reject, but resist the globalized establishment, linking arms and joining hoarse voices with all other resistors against any facet of its illegitimate existence; all apologies in advance for my privilege.
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