Ode To The One Percent

The air is cool, but the sun bright and warm. Traffic rumbles by on this four lane street that used to be considered a highway before the quick, glossy interstates. Across from me there is a structure with four open walls, two tables, and four chairs. I am sitting in the shadows against the building wall among three other tables outside. Across the street there is a large Walgreens and a busy strip mall, and across from that an Auto Collision Shop for high end cars with high end prices.

I’m sitting here, outside the coffee shop, using a router I bought from a Facebook ad, and a pad that only works when connected to Wi-Fi on Columbus Day--the day of tragedy for Africa, the Americas, and most of the known world because it opened the door for genocide, chattel slavery, and the exploitation and degradation of most of the Non-European people of the world. As Columbus said. These people are kind and generous. We can enslave them with less than 100 men, which he immediately began.

Such atrocities in human history had never been recorded so proudly and boldly before the colonization movement. Here I sit in the midst of desolation of a Native American culture in a country slightly repentant for those atrocities, but not really; not enough to make up for the pain and suffering of millions of people all over the world spread out across countless generations.

This is the real tragedy. Things look good. We’ve adopted the colonizer mindset as we often speak of exploring mars, but more often we speak of colonizing mars and colonizing space. I would pity any other life form that we found out there that wasn’t technologically advanced enough to defend itself from us. You know we would fight to take their planet and resources.

But the coffee is good today–Starbucks. I have a slice of pumpkin loaf. That makes everything all right in some people’s eyes. It's not too sweet or bready, but just right. The store is not open. Big warning signs that say danger, do not enter, are placed on the windows and door, but you may go in, pick up your drink and leave. They can't tell you that you can’t stay in because of the covid epidemic. That would be illegal now, as illegal as mandatory masks so they have to find innovative ways to tell you what the government refuses to say.

Don’t enter creates just enough fear and enough of a warning to help people get the hint. Why no mandates? It would be bad for the economy. It would be bad for business. Truth is that there is just a trace of that old Colonial Columbus mentally left among the ruling class who have decided that it is worth the life of a few people to keep the economy going and to gain an abundance of abundance to sock away in their portfolios. The colonizers philosophy is that people are expendable, if they are not like me.

I stop writing for a moment as it gets more noisy. A large trash truck idles at the light next to me spilling out a rumbling, loud amount of noise pollution. A large line of traffic in all four lanes extends out of sight in both directions. The light changes. Traffic rushes by again, like normal. The truck makes a left turn, enters the lot, picks up a dumpster, slams it a few times, and moves on to its next pickup.

The brown noise continues. Everything is back to the artificial quiet normal which is loud, but we have learned to be good at pretending. In a world created by colonizers and for colonizers one becomes good at pretending and ignoring the obvious. Fifty percent of the people share 2% of the wealth. The top 10% hold almost 90%. Where does that leave us and how can we say we live in a democracy? I’m sure that most of the people never voted to be poor. The coffee shop is open, but not open.

This is the world we live in. With no more land to colonize all that is left to colonize are the brains of the colonized. At one time the heretics were burned at the stake–the word meaning those able to choose, now they are chorded off into tents in affluent cities and towns, or in low wage jobs paying one third of what it takes to lead a decent life, or in prisons who received more money per prisoner each year, than a minimum wage worker would make in 5 years. Things haven't really changed that much. Yet again, we have learned to pretend. The threat of a tongue lashing followed by the possibility and the fear of homelessness often leading to possible arrest has trained us well. We have learned to pretend so well that we have learned to fool ourselves.

Colonized minds believe the lies. They put their faith in economic promises that have never been fulfilled for the majority of the people and in the possibility of rising above all others, claiming the golden ring, and proving that we are better than everyone else. That makes everyone a potential expendable, and that’s the way they like it. We are like crabs in a barrel, except many of us don’t even have a barrel.