BET YOUR LIFE

A wonderful way of life is sweeping across the land. Now that people have accepted greed as good, not bad, not evil, no longer a cardinal sin, but a good quality worthy of human nature, we have by logical extension approved one of its related behaviors. Gambling, once a dark destructive preoccupation of human frailty, has become good clean fun. More than fun, it carries a possible blessing of wealth. Granted the chance of becoming wealthy this way is slimmer than the likelihood of a politician campaigning honestly in a district full of gullible citizens who would not know a lie if it weighed three hundred pounds, sat on their laps, and bit off their noses while cooing, "Kiss me, baby. I'm the Queen of Sheba."

Nonetheless, gambling is fun, so much fun we charmingly refer to it as gaming, as if it were a healthy sport. True, the results of gambling are countless losers with rare winners, but let us not negate the thrill of pulling of the handle, flipping the card, or rolling the die, when a chronically unlucky person can suddenly become fortunate. Such incredibly surreal hope makes life worth living, especially for those given to bouts of stratospheric fantasy.

The skeptic, the naysayer, the stick-in-the-mud may insist gambling is threatening the quality of life, that one may as well throw money into the street instead of shoving it into machines or stacking it up on tables of green. But such crepe-hangers would be wrong. Life is a gamble, whether it be the happenstance of birth, the unpredictability of death, or any of the myriad chances in between succeeding or failing, rising or falling, winning or losing in this world. We would be missing life were we to avoid risk at every step or turn. Nothing ventured nothing gained, even if it means losing everything.

So cash out the equity left in your real estate. Consolidate your credit cards for maximum borrowing power. Grab cash advances on your paycheck. Scrape together every dime, nickel, and penny you can find and turn them into quarters for the slots. Play stock market roulette on the internet. Bet the dog and pony shows. Buy every lottery ticket you can afford; if you cannot afford one, buy it anyway, and go hungry for a day or two. You could probably stand to lose a few pounds. Take your vacations, if not already broke, to some glittering metropolis of decadence, such as Las Vegas. The glamour of the neon oasis in the middle of the bomb blasted desert makes you feel like a million bucks, even if you have less than fifty bucks in the bank. So what if you lose your shirt. Some get rich. Probably they are only the owners of the casinos, but when anyone gets rich, you believe you could be next.

Max out your credit. Sell your furniture. Sell your house. Sell the kids into slavery. Sell your own body or at least a kidney or any organ you can spare. You may as well sell your brain too for a few bucks to blow in blackjack. Hell, you're not using it anyway.

THE NEW TYRANNY

Historically we have condemned the totalitarian state as hell on Earth. We have feared and fought evil dictators to the losses of many lives. We have sacrificed much for freedom and brag whenever we can about how much we cherish and enjoy it. Sure, we often take it for granted. That is only natural. Animals get used to good times and think they will last forever like the sun. Maybe this the reason we are not objecting to a new form of totalitarianism that has risen like an ogre from our midst. We should know the ogre well. We gave birth to it.

This new dictatorial system is our baby grown gargantuan. It permeates our daily lives and has spread its tentacles around the world. Having become so familiar to us, it goes by different names: Big Business, the International Market, and the Global Economy. We may call it Megacorp—the big fat giant that controls the world. The puppet master that pulls the strings on every political figurehead on the planet. Together with its financial vizier, the International Monetary Fund, it controls the world.

We like to think we have real power with our votes, our placards, our letters to government, our marches in the streets. Yeah. We also dream of going to heaven when we die. We are as unwilling to accept death as an eternal dreamless sleep as we are to accept that Megacorp runs our lives, that its propaganda machine control our minds, that we have no real freedom. We think do but we do not. Freedom to mouth off means little when we continue to serve the master. We live in a make-believe world like figures in a doll house, totally dependent on the whims of the master who plays us.  

Nonetheless, we have the power to cut the strings of the master puppeteer and raise the quality of life on Earth. We have only to stop feeding the monster. Stop buying things. Let the beast go without sustenance long enough and it will do our bidding like the jinni in the lamp. This would require sacrifice but would reap immense rewards. Basically, we would have to give up things, a lot of things, to get what we really need.

If we fail to deprive ourselves willingly for the sake of justice for all, we will suffer severely for the sake of Megacorp. We have the choice. Exist and die as playthings of this new totalitarian master or live free.

HOW TO BE HAPPY

At last we have found the way to happiness! For centuries people have sought joy in life by various means that have all left us less than satisfied. We have tried romantic love as a way to ecstasy. We have attempted to amass personal fortunes. We have pursued sexual entanglements for physical delight. We have eaten ourselves fat for bounteous satiety. But none of these behaviors has made us feel truly and constantly happy. Fortunately we have discovered right under our noses on counters, shelves, carts, telephones, and computers the path to heaven on Earth—a new secular faith greater than any religion, love affair, or feast—consumerism.

We are born to buy. And never has buying been easier. We used to need a few coins in our pockets to purchase a loaf of bread or a few potatoes. That has radically changed. We have been freed to buy almost whatever, whenever, wherever we want. And we always want. We eat, sleep, and dream of what we want. And we want everything money can buy, even if we do not have any money.

What in the old days was an obstacle to acquisition, that is, insufficient money in the bank, has all but disappeared. Nowadays we are blessed with an almost unlimited line of credit in the form of a shiny piece of plastic. A flexible substitute for money cut in the form of the golden rectangle accompanies us everywhere. In case we spot some attractive item for sale that we do not yet possess, we whip out our wallets and unfold a strap of five or ten cards, all at different stages of financial rotation. When we maximize the limit on one card we have another still open to slap on the sales counter and make a purchase. No fuss with counting currency, no muss with writing checks, no worry about sufficient funds. Buy now, pay later. Or we can roll one card into another and maybe never pay our bills. A virtually unlimited line of credit. We just keep making tiny little monthly payments of pocket money and the line goes on for a lifetime of shopping.

Constant shopping means happiness for billions. We are what we have. The more we have the more important we are. The one who dies with the most things wins the game of life. No matter we amass mountains of debt. Borrow and spend is the mantra of the new economy. Governments do it. Corporations that own the governments do it. Cooperatively everyone else does it. If you are not at least $5000 in debt, you are not on your game. You are not even trying. Besides, we can always hock ourselves to keep consuming.

A sure way to guarantee continued shopping, even when we find our credit cards maximized, lies readily available. Indenturism. Not slavery but a civil contract. We sell ourselves to the company store. We work to earn to buy to have to work to earn to buy to have and so on until we become too old to work and we die happy. Then if we have acquired enough to make us at least temporarily happy, we finally expire in a state of comfort, maybe even luxury, surrounded by things, stuff that makes our lives worthwhile. What a relief!

If we should ever succumb to a totalitarian state that forces us to consume for the sake of the nation, we would be ready to give up our rights for the duty of supporting a free-market economy. Not such a bad idea, right? People will be pleased to oblige the megacorporations that control the minds and bodies of the masses by working as many hours of the day and as many days of the week as possible to make enough money to pay the ever-renewing bills for the purchase of products made by the megacorporations. No matter if we lose free time and the right to choose our own ways of life. The loss of these formerly established essentials of decent civilization is worth the benefit of having more things. Things are the great goal of living. Not people or ideas but things occupy us and stimulate our spirits to believe in a quality of life based on the marvelous marketplace. No more valuable institution could ever exist.

So let us go now and visit the malls. Let us bring our plastic. Let us make a day and a night of the exciting experience. Let us shop all morning from the opening of the doors, lunch at a mall fast food stand, shop all afternoon. Dine in a mall restaurant. Catch a movie in the mall theater and then shop until the doors close. Buy, buy, buy, buy for we are what we have. Nothing more, nothing less.

BLESSED ARE THE NOISEMAKERS

If anything is missing from this wonderful world, it has to be more and louder noise. We have too many seconds of peace and quiet. We need lots of cacophonous events in our lives. How else can we know we are alive? Without noise to keep us awake and edgy we could fall into a relaxed state of mind that would permit all sorts of uncommon behavior, such as thinking, meditating, and sleeping.

Nothing stimulates the mind more than a sudden discharge of raucous sound in the middle of relaxation or rest. And this is as it should be. Nothing worthwhile is accomplished in the meditative state. Some describe it as vegetative. Planted. Rooted. Slow. Mindless. All apt descriptions. We of the human species, created and blessed by God as we are, despite our few disgusting and despicable habits, have no business wasting away our days and nights in quietude.

Fortunately, we do not have to step one foot outdoors to avoid this waste of time. Take a typical day from midnight to midnight. We hear noise repeatedly during the pre-dawn hours. Maybe the source is an apartment neighbor's all night yammering on the telephone or her TV droning though walls with the apparent density of gauze. Maybe a group across the street is enjoying an all night party and their music is blasting out of huge three-hundred watt speakers as they try to shout over their own celebratory racket. Maybe someone fires up a vehicle with an unmuffled internal combustion engine that rattles window panes and startles sleepers into believing Armageddon has finally arrived. But it is not the end of the world, even thought it sounds like it. It is only someone operating a machine to make him appear to others as a superhuman creature. Look at me! I'm here and I make noise! Lots of earsplitting, teeth chattering, mind-numbing noise. What a goddamned mythical hero I must be!

Ah, yes, nothing like it! When the sharp crack, rattle, and rumble of an engine snaps us awake at three in the morning, we know it instantly as a call to action, an unmistakable alert to get up and go, even if it means groping in the dark. At first we are too disoriented to know the time of day, the space we occupy, and the planet we inhabit. Thanks, though, to the alarming noise of this ubiquitous mechanized product of our machinations we quickly realize we must be home in bed before dawn on Earth inhabited by billions of other people with at least one of them making a hell of lot of noise at one time and place or another around the globe.

This was not always so. When not waging one of their many wars, our ancestors lacked noise-making instruments beyond their voices, hammers, whips, pipes, drums, and the occasional gunshot. How bored they must have been to live through whole days and nights in utterly monotonous peace and quiet. Today, fortunately, a plethora of percussive devices surround us like the marching machines of monstrous alien invaders to ready us for the next moment of terror.

Fortunately a brain-quivering noise is always ready in the wings to keep us conscious, focused, excited, and aggressive. And any rare gaps of comparative calm are filled by the steady stream of an endless variety of miscellaneous auditory eruptions. Look at a partial list of human inventions to enliven a single day: jackhammers, powersaws, powerdrills, powersanders, blowers, powerlawnmowers, rotary tillers, weedwackers, sandblasters, and steam cleaners. Not to forget all the sirens, bells, whistles, horns, drums, amplifiers, loud-speakers, audiosystems, telephones, disposals, compactors, crushers, washing machines, skateboards, speedboats, helicopters, and airplanes. And we must include people screaming and hollering, barking dogs, slammed doors, garage bands, gunshots, rocket blasts, car and fire alarms, garbage trucks, explosions, and other noises of unknown source. Of course nature provides some of this entertainment. And during clement weather we are always ready to fill silent spaces between episodes of the raging elements. Noise may be our grossest domestic product. And we cherish it as we should.

Let anyone try to shut us up or even suggest we are making too much noise and we will fight for our perceived right to generate decibels enough to shatter granite.

It's a free country! We have every right to behave as freely as we want, even if we disturb others to the point of madness. You may say the quiet have rights too. Certainly they do, as long as they are part of the boisterous masses. Majority rules in a democratic state. Those who yell and beat and boom comprise the greatest number of us; thus, their rights trump those of the silent minority.

Any person worth his salt would fight and die for his rights. If anyone should show the temerity of trying to quell the raucous noise of the righteous many, they have another right—to protect themselves as violently as necessary. Whatever it takes. Right? Obviously God loves those who sound off the loudest because they have become so incredibly numerous and they are increasing in number every instant. Blessed are the noisemakers for they shall inherit the Earth. Bang!

EXPLOSIVE HUMANITY

Bombs bursting in air! What an image! Whistling rockets, noise like gunshots, fiery flora against the black of night, ghostly clusters with trails of smoke, and the acrid odor of overheated chemicals. An incendiary incitement to jingoistic fervor—fireworks. Some of us, the people of the United States of America, may think our "Independence Day" is unique for its pyrotechnic celebration, but they would be wrong. People around the world have been touching flame to fuse for various and numerous occasions since the Chinese invented gunpowder: the Pooram and Diwali festivals in India, Guy Fawkes Day in England, Halloween in Ireland, Canada Day, the Malta International Fireworks festival, the Pyrotechnics Guild International convention, New Year, and countless occasions from birth to death that rationalize the rockets red glare.

In the USA the inspiration for filling our nightskies with a multitude of exploding lights on July Fourth was the War of 1812. Although we probably blew up things in celebration from the first American colonial holidays, that particular conflict among our score of battles and skirmishes throughout history set the tradition for the future. So when Francis Scott Key wrote those cloying lines to an old English drinking song during that war, he ignited a latent desire in our human hearts to celebrate violence with a bang. How apt. Art mirrors life; that is, if a fireworks display can be considered art. One thing for sure, it reflects in lesser magnitude the ordnance of military combat. So let us look at this event for its redundant reality. The burning accelerant, bombs, rockets, and sundry detonation devices disperse heavy metals, sulfur-coal compounds, and other toxic chemicals into the atmosphere. The loud snap-bang-boom noises terrify dogs, cats, birds, and other living things and distress humans sensible and smart enough to know a dangerous event when they see, hear, and smell it.

Nonetheless, millions of people gather when the sun goes down to gawk at a region of low altitude, expectant of an enormous show of ostensibly innocuous firepower against the nocturnal firmament. Planets, stars, moons, meteor showers, and boreal lights are not immediately violent enough to stimulate the peculiarly human penchant for things that blast and burn in garish colors. Makes one wonder if a cosmic event would attract such an avidly dedicated response. Just imagine it.
One of the many giant asteroids that shoot past Earth at varying distances heads straight for our ball in space. Upon entering our stratosphere, it breaks into pieces, each one the size of a mountain, and catches fire. These massive piles spread apart just enough to strike the planet in different places. When they hit the surface, they explode with a force millions of times the power of the fission bomb we dropped on Hiroshima. Those that hit the oceans form tsunamis a thousand feet high that suck the surf off the shores, roll like juggernauts across miles of open sea, and then crash into coastlines, engulfing cities and washing them clean of everything not permanently grounded. Those that hit land blast soil, rock, structures, and living things, hundreds of feet into the air, obliterate the light of the sun, choke the atmosphere with debris and gases, igniting all combustible substances and disintegrating everything not already swept away by the flood. The cataclysmic combination of noise, wind, dust, and heat eliminates most remnants of life on the planet. For days, months, decades afterward Earth is a dark, intemperate, wasteland, silent but for the endless winds that whip the devastated surface of the once magnificent blue-white orb of life. That would be the ultimate fireworks display, worthy of the hand of a god. What a spectacle to behold! If only we could survive it!

How ironic that we enjoy playing in miniature with the elements of catastrophe. Apparently we are not satisfied with the disasters of wildfire, lightning strikes, war, or cosmic events. We like to blow things up for any occasion, even if it means polluting our world with noise and lethal fumes, terrifying our fellow creatures, and even hurting ourselves. How many children have lost fingers, hands, hearing, and sight because of this irrational activity disguised as merriment?

Maybe the crazy act of blowing things up and watching the explosion with glee signifies our profound suicidalism. We are the only self-destructive species. How interesting that we over-populate our planet yet simultaneously seek to eliminate ourselves. More than a celebration of life, fireworks are a flamboyant signification of our fascination with the forces that cause death. Of course fire can indirectly cause renewed life but it more often causes destruction. Setting off explosives does nothing for our quality of life but it certainly degenerates it.

When multiple bombs burst into spectral bloom over our upturned heads, we utter sounds of awe and amazement but we do not connect the fallout from those profane flowers to the unpleasant effects on our being. Particle pollutants in the air we breathe cause many adverse health conditions from eye irritation to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, as well as others of which we may not be aware, yet we cheer whenever we see a crackling cause for such toxicity burst upon the evening. Surely, we will not perish en masse from fireworks but every time we set them off we spark the fuse of our extinction, real and symbolic. Sooner or later we will perish as a species, either by our own hand or by the divine power of nature. Each time we send a rocket into the air we are signaling that complete demise. When that finally happens, it may not be the last gleaming of twilight on Earth, but one fact is certain—our flags will not be there.

THE ONLY WAY TO IMPROVE THE WORLD

We have only one thoroughly effective way to make planet Earth a better place for all of us. We cannot improve our condition by marching up and down the square. Nor can we do so by complaining to our selected representatives. Nor even by voting. Not any longer. The only way is to boycott the sources of our swelling misery.

Megacorporations rule the world. They have achieved this unprecedented power with the oceans of money we have rendered unto them by consuming their products. They, not the politicians, control our lives. They decide who runs for elections. They approve the bills that pass to the president's signing table. They persuade the people how to act, how to dress, how to eat, how to travel, how to live, even how to think. They appear almost omnipotent in their global reach, but they are vulnerable. Their weakness is their dependency on the very individuals from whom they have derived their supreme wealth and power--us.

We, the people, have more than inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We have the power to make the world go round as we see fit. If we want universal healthcare for everybody, we can have it. If we want a guaranteed living wage for all workers, we can have it. If we want free high quality education for everyone from birth to death, we can have it. We are politically omnipotent. The power is in our hands, rather, in our wallets.

All we have to do is deny ourselves, deny ourselves the things we do not need, such as extra food and clothes and cars and fuel and on and on... If we deny ourselves unnecessary and useless things and stick to our principles, then if we inform the corporate powers of what we are doing and that we want a better world, they will fall on their knees before us. They will beg us to tell them how they can help to assure our lives, our liberty, and our pursuit of happiness.

Of course it will be difficult. It was difficult for the followers of Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Cesar Chavez. But look what they accomplished for their people. Self-denial is not easy but it is virtuous. Nothing worthwhile is easy. By self-sacrifice we will become stronger, leaner, tougher, united, and invincible against the plutocratic powers that tyrannize our world.

Before life on Earth becomes intolerable for everyone but the few castled super-rich, let us join by the thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, by the millions to take back our rights. This beautiful aqueous planet has always belonged to all of us great and small. Let us retrieve it once and for all time. The only action we need take is not aggressive, violent, nor destructive, but peaceful, passive, and empowering. Join me. I and many others have already begun. Boycott! Boycott for the good of everyone.