Don’t call me Shirley

Surely it’s what everyone wants, when born involuntarily onto a planet providing the perfect conditions for creating and sustaining life: to have the freely available and plentiful things we need to survive paywalled; trained to settle for a lifetime of indentured servitude to ensure both our survival and exponential profits from our labor for our owners; our air, water, land, food, and bodies poisoned by corporations; our shelters from the elements made barely attainable for most, totally unattainable for many, homelessness rampant while more than enough homes stand empty, then homelessness criminalized; made sick by living like this, then having the modicum of currency we’re able to accumulate funneled into a for-profit healthcare system that can’t make us well; having our sex, gender, love lives, and reproductive rights dictated by a cabal of nine unelected, paid-for cronies; having a swath of our meager labor compensation collected for our “protection” (oppression), CEO payouts & corporate bailouts, and overseas genocide; to boil the whole earth so machines can make terrible, meaningless art no one likes or enjoys; the cost of living arbitrarily skyrocketing, life expectancy and the joy of being alive plummeting; and given the choice to vote for one of two pudding-brained puppets chosen for us who will ensure the whole thing keeps working like this, as intended.

Surely we MUST want this, because if we didn’t, there are way more than enough of us to do something else. Surely we would. Wouldn’t we…? Surely we wouldn’t allow ourselves to be involuntarily trapped into a death spiral set in motion by a handful of people long before we were born, to the detriment of every living being and creature on the planet—not when we had the means and desire to stop it. Right?

Right…?