How We’re Headed Toward Cannibalism: A Theory
Just filled out a rental application and gave out all my most personal and financial information to a complete stranger who can peer into my life at any time–even after someone else rents the place. What’s wrong with this picture? Renters have zero rights in Portland (and elsewhere in America). We have no choice but to hand our identities over to private entities called “landlords.” Renters unfortunate enough to get entangled with unscrupulous landlords could end up dealing with identity theft. I’m sure this would be an extremely rare occurrence, but it could happen.
This pro-corporate-government (fascist) society that defers to privatization offers no protection to people without capital; it strips the majority of its citizens of its rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. You are what you (don’t) own. If you own property or a business, you are on the map. If you own nothing, you’re a nobody. You have no rights.
This reality boils down to a simple equation: The more capital/assets you own in America, the more power you wield and the less liable you are to being prosecuted for criminal activity.
Entitlement aside, I wonder how many people in America are forced to turn to crime to survive, making it harder on the rest of us who had more privileged histories? What’s the percentage of population that would turn criminal regardless of necessity? I’ll wager that it’s small. But given human nature, I can’t be certain of any motivation behind behavior. I do know that Arizona just passed a law that makes it illegal to hire human beings who aren’t living in America legally. The truth is, most of these human beings were forced from their own countries because of American trade policies, i.e. NAFTA and CAFTA, which makes it impossible to earn a livelihood in your native country.
The world as it is now is careening into a period of resource wars. There’s a sobering piece in the “Readings” section in the March issue of Harper’s. “The Mortician” (online article available for subscribers only) is from an interview by Liao Yiwu with Zhang Daoling, a seventy-one-year-old mortician at a funeral home in Chengdu, China. The Corpse Walker, Liao’s collection of interviews, will be published next month by Pantheon. The jist of the interview recounts how during Mao’s Great Leap Forward in the early 1960s, people were driven off their farms to work in the steel factories. Massive food shortages and starvation resulted. “Thousands of people roamed the mountains like locusts, desperately searching for things that were edible–tree bark, grass, roots, wild vegetables, bugs. The mountaintops had all been deforested to feed the furnaces….While walking around to look for food, many people simply dropped dead.” Liao’s mortuary was inundated with corpses–many of them gnawed by human beings.
My point here is that we have no idea what is to come now that we’ve been shoved out of our comfort zones here in America. We’re soft. We have no idea how to fend for ourselves. I may be stretching things too far here, but what makes anyone so certain that we (the unwashed masses of Americans in the Neo Gulag State) aren’t headed for a similar fate as the Chinese people just before the Cultural Revolution?
We may not have to worry about starvation given that 1 in 100 Americans now live in privatized prisons. How’s that for black humor?
Regardless, given the sad state of the economy, the skyrocketing price of oil, and the ravages caused by the destruction of the environment, and the exponential rise of global warming, I foresee suffering on a scale never before experienced just around the corner.
