Figuratively Speaking  Sam Ramer

Do you ever try and mentally gather your world into one hand, maybe two? The trouble with this is that my world is too big these days. I’ve got plastics and silica from oceans away. Incense wafts and tea steeps from lands far and forests unknown.  Regardless of the products’ identities, they are all touched by others hands, by other humans. Merging my world into theirs, creating a direct connection to dinner tables around which they eat. Obliging their jobs to my consumption, as they are subjected to the force that pays their wages, that feeds their children. Don’t mistake my intent; I’m glad to help another mammal eat. I’m just not as appreciative of the things we demand and the things that come attached. Happy meal toys, soap dishes, international conflict, genocide, invasive species, or Wal-Mart’s size.

On top of this societal quagmire, my income tax dollars are going to do exactly the opposite of feeding babies. Instead of paying wages and filling mouths, I’m paying for mines and bullets, for smokeless ammo and uranium tips.  Seven hundred and fifty thousand people worth if you live in Iraq. Or, if a country a step behind the free market (e.g. Sierra Leone) gets involved in this trade, upheaval by faux revolutionary forces and child soldiers. Guns are the power while diamonds are the currency. Who cares how the workers are treated? Who cares where they’ve come from? Just get the diamonds, at all cost. Dig them all up and put them in rings so civilized brides can wear the souls of the men who died to get them.

An economist will tell you that these socio-politics of the free market are not his primary concern. The international free market is conceived to generate products at their lowest cost based on a country’s infrastructure. So if wages happen to be a little low or (non-existent) for a country, the capitalist is first concerned about his trade. If the country revolts or goods get destroyed it will interfere with his sales. It is therefore in his best interest to keep the country under wrap with whatever forces he has at his disposal. These small estates and their lords give up their sovereignty to the men who make demands for their country’s supplies.

Meanwhile, this global system seems to imply that we, United States citizens, must fill up our space mentally and physically with more and more things. Whether the things are useful or not, we fill up this space willingly. Happily redistributing our wealth to those at the top of the capitalist pyramid. Ignoring implications as our collective poverty builds.  Meanwhile, the advertisements rain down to confine and define us into little molds. Are you sold? They seek to kill the grass roots so they can lay down astro-turf for easy maintenance and no unexpected dirt.

Since I am impotent and insignificant in this game of global change, I go back through things I’ve purchased and endorsed.  To evaluate how my paper currency carries its force. It measures karma in inescapable decisions to buy and support, to coerce and extort.  That is why I can say with little recourse that I have blood on my hands.  I have supported war in the form of income tax and oil. I can say that there are children under my feet for I have endorsed slavery with cheap necessities in cloths and shoes.  I can say that I have the world in my hands because our economy demands it through its origins of supply. Now, place around me all the stuff I’ve purchased, my plastic trinkets and shiny rocks and here I stand, blood red hands with contorted children’s faces underneath, surrounded by a pile of sand and rust as I try to keep the weight of the world balanced on my breast. It’s only a matter of time before that world crushes me underneath to exist eternally with the children at my feet. As slaves for a few powerful men to manipulate and deceive. For who is going to pull me out from underneath, who will be kind enough to help a man with bloodied hands? Some would say Jesus, Allah, or some other metaphysical relief. I’m hoping sustainability and free speech.