Feed Yourself And Your Community, Not Billionaires
If you believe you are living in an unjust world and you want to figure out who is to blame, look at the people who have the most money. That’s a pretty good indicator that they are profiting from a system that is not working for you or for the average person. If you want to make the system better, stop giving your money to those people who already have all of the money and are already in control of the system. I know that this is not ALWAYS possible. But it often IS possible. I’m willing to bet that there are multiple times each day where you give your money to rich people when you don’t have to. You might get a little something in return, but you are strengthening a relationship in which they have the power and you are dependent upon them. They may give you rewards points on your credit card, but they are profiting from every little exchange you make with a small shop owner or a person who sells their books on Amazon. Credit card companies are profiting more than they are giving. They are taking money from you and from the small businesses who are forced to eat the costs on each item they sell. If you really care about making the world a better place, don’t do that. I’m not even suggesting you stop cold turkey, start small. Exercise your resistance muscles slowly at first, or else you will snap those puny little limbs you have never developed because you’ve allowed giant corporations to provide you with convenience your whole life.
Instead of paying for GrubHub, where the CEO earns x amount of money off all the labor other people are doing, you could get your food yourself. Maybe not every time, I know there are old people who do not like to drive and young people who are busy trying to raise a family. But if you were to occasionally refuse to give your money to a rich person…I don’t know, a couple of bucks here, a couple of bucks there…if you and a few million other people were to do that, BAM! This rich person no longer has a corporation to extract hundreds of millions of dollars from.
Oh, I know, such conveniences are useful. But we used to have this sort of service all the time. I would order from the local pizza place and they would have their own delivery people. No CEOs involved. Hell, we used to have a local taxi driver (who didn’t work for some CEO) pick up our food from a local restaurant (that was not part of a multi-national franchise), and deliver it to our house at a cost no greater than what you are paying some huge corporation to do so now. Heck, before Amazon, we still managed to buy books. See, you don’t have to have super rich billionaires profiting off of every single thing working people make or do. In fact, the ideal amount of money we give to billionaires who are psychologically incapable of being a part of a healthy society should be exactly zero dollars.
There are other ways than giving your money to huge and powerful corporations and the elite few who own them. The alternatives just aren’t able to flourish where intrusive species have overtaken the garden. Once you rip out the McDonald’s and EatStreets that have overgrown your town or city, it leaves room for healthier plants to grow. They will naturally rise from the ground to fill the gap. Just so long as you tend to the garden.
As a consumer, there are many different ways to avoid giving your money to rich people and the corporations that have overtaken the governments of most of the countries in the world. If you buy a tomato from a farmers’ market, you are not only avoiding giving your money to a major grocery chain, you are not giving your money to Big Ag, either. Since that tomato is not being shipped across country, you are not giving your money to the big trucking companies, and the amount of profits being gained by Big Oil is drastically less. If you spend 100 dollars a week on locally-sourced food each week like my wife and I do, we’re looking at a very significant reduction of money we give to corporations and a corresponding increase in what we funnel to small farmers and food producers. Think of the impact it would have if a few million people reduced the amount of money they gave to the corporate food chain by 5,000 dollars every year (I’ll let you do the math).
Fuck the billionaire-owned football teams and stadiums. Let them leave your town rather than give your tax dollars to build a new stadium. Any team that would be willing to do that is not a team worth supporting. Stop buying their overpriced merchandise. Have your city sponsor their own team and have their merchandise be made by union labor. That’s the kind of team you should be cheering.
Stop making your children sell corporate cookies to raise money for the Girl Scouts. What is that teaching them? Have them make the cookies themselves. Instead of kids selling corporate candy to raise money for band, why not have them sell services like cutting lawns for the elderly? Get creative rather than letting big corporations come up with all the ideas. At this point, all their ideas are little more than combining a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup with an Oreo Cookie.
Another aspect of this is, besides not giving your money to super rich people and instead giving it to working class people such as yourself, is not giving your labor to billionaires. In other words, try to find a job that produces goods and services for average people rather than for rich people. Stop building mansions for them. Stop building their fancy resorts. If you work out of a union hall, as many steelworkers, electricians and carpenters do, you have a choice as to which projects you want to work on. Stop working on projects that benefit the ruling elite to the detriment of the ordinary people and the environment.
Stop building their data centers that are wiping out farmland and will be used to suppress any resistance to their system that we might put up. It’s like working for Emperor Palpatine to build a Death Star, for God’s sake.
Stop building their yachts. Even the slaves of Ancient Egypt did not so willingly work for their masters as the modern-day workers salivate at the thought of pleasing their masters. And for God’s sake, stop building their underground bunkers in which they intend to ride out the global destruction they are causing.
Admittedly, it is hard to find a job where you are not employed by a company that is owned by wealthy people. They own most everything nowadays. But that’s where your shopping habits will help. The more you and others shop at food co-ops, the more people will be hired by food co-ops. The more you buy from small shop owners, the more employees those shop owners are going to hire. The more you support independent musicians, the more sound engineers will find work producing their music and the less sound engineers will be “working for MCA.”
Oh, and stop voting for their political candidates. Stop voting for billionaires or people who work for billionaires. Stop listening to the radio and TV and whatever else you get your messaging from that is owned and controlled by billionaires. Become a patron of some podcaster, blogger, or independent journalist who is doing quality work. Even if you have to cancel your HBO account to afford it.
If you can’t summon the energy to oppose billionaires by refusing to do business with them, you’re not going to bring out the guillotines. So stop talking the talk without walking the walk. If you can’t refuse the itch for a Reese’s candy bar or a Starbuck’s Latte, then you’re not going to muster the disciplined revolutionary fervor required to overthrow a government and a system which by now has gone global. Start small. Show yourself that you are capable of resisting in small ways. Show yourself that you do not need the petty gewgaws they are always trying to force upon you. Demonstrate that the natural world is more important than the resource-devouring artificial world they want to lock you into. Demonstrate that spirituality exists and that you can feed it and make it grow stronger both by performative and practical efforts. Kick holes in the all-encompassing system until you find glimpses of a world outside it. Tell yourself once and for all that love truly is more important than possessions, that nature truly is healing and essential, that interconnection between living people is more important than interconnectivity with machines and corporations.
They are leading us to hell and to extinction. This is not hyperbole, they are literally leading us to hell and extinction. Stop following them. Stop feeding them. Your support of them leads you to your own doom. And not your doom merely but the doom of all humanity. It is leading to the doom of all living things on this planet. Perhaps cockroaches may survive. That and a few billionaires living in their bunkers eating canned food and watching DVDs on 150 inch screens. But they’re not really any better than cockroaches, are they?
I know it’s hard, I know it’s not always possible, I know that small measures seem futile in the face of immense obstacles. That’s why it is so vital that we build our political will, our muscles and our skills. This WILL take all of us working in conjunction. Work from where you are, do what you can, and look around for those whose efforts and successes are inspiring. Take back the natural world from those who are even altering the genetic makeup of the food you eat and the children you give birth to. Trust me when I tell you you don’t want to raise a child with genes that are patented by Elon Musk.
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