The Stone Breakers, by Gustave Courbet. 1849
There is a scene in “The Hurt Locker” near the end that made me think of something that was probably not intended by the director at all, though it may have been. As for the movie itself, I thought it was good, but not nearly as good as the Academy did. I especially disliked the very last scene, which struck me as a return to old style Hollywood glorification of war, which was jolting, given that most of the movie prior to that had managed to avoid those cliches. Watching “The Hurt Locker” up to that point pretty much gave us a visual representation of the total madness and absurdity of war, especially of the war in Iraq. I am also not a fan of hand held cameras and that oh so contrived attempt to create a “documentary” style. Rather than make me feel I’m a part of the action, it just makes me conscious of the camera, and makes it harder to suspend my disbelief.
But back to that scene. Sgt William James (Jeremy Renner) is back in America after one tour of duty in Iraq, and he’s buying groceries with his wife, played by Evangeline Lilly. She is elsewhere as he stares at row upon row of sugary cereal in an endless aisle. Commercialism run amok, as far as the eye can see, and my first response to his stare was to guess his thoughts: “I risked my life in Iraq so I could come back to this? To row upon row of shit for breakfast? Row upon row of the same massed-produced, unhealthy garbage? I spent more than a year in the desert for this crap?”
Which takes me somewhere else yet again: Common sense.
It makes absolutely no sense to me that we let our democracy go largely to waste. We have economic apartheid in this country, and our destinies are all too much at the mercy of the whims of corporate America and the wealthy in general. We are the majority — those of us who are not rich — but a tiny fraction of a fraction controls far too much of our lives. They decide what we get to choose from on our grocery store shelves. They decide the quality of our cars, homes, electronics. They run the government and tell our representatives what to do on their behalf, not ours. They write our legislation for us, so they game the system again and again and again. For the rich. Our government is by the rich, for the rich, on behalf of the rich, and it’s getting worse all the time.
We think we’re free. We think we have so many options. But we never get to pick and choose what those options are. We are at the mercy of business interests, which give us what they want us to buy, not what is healthy for us, or safe, or beneficial. They have collectivized us, at work and through the power of marketing, and rather than see that business interests have “socialized us” and run the show, including our supposedly democratic government, all too many people lash out at that government, avoiding the white elephant in the room.
To me, that we allow this to happen in a democracy is criminally stupid. That we allow less than 1% to dictate the terms of our lives is obscenely ignorant. Common sense tells us that we, the people, should control our own economic destiny. Common sense tells us that after thousands of years of letting the rich control the poor, we should know better than let that continue decade after decade.
Common sense also tells us it’s time for a radical change. It’s time to use our democracy for the benefit of the people as a whole, and end economic apartheid, which would end spiritual dissolution as well. It would be a renewal that would feed upon itself and strengthen its own ground, again and again, propelling it beyond past theories into a new land no one has ever seen.
The phrase scares so many people. They’ve been inoculated against the words and the concepts for so long. They’ve been lied to for decades by the very people this change would hurt the most, the rich, and they can’t see how much they, the people, the working class, the rank and file, would gain from such a change.
Common sense.
Logic, rationality, justice, compassion, equality, egalitarianism. All of these things are common sense words and ideas. In a democracy, why shouldn’t the people rule? Why shouldn’t the people be able to call the shots and decide as one the direction of our economy? Why shouldn’t we be able to say that you must put healthy foods on the shelves, clean water in our pipes, green cars on our streets, the best schools, libraries, hospitals, roads and bridges throughout our neighborhoods, cities and states? Why shouldn’t we be able to dictate to businesses that they produce goods and services that benefit us, not just the rich? Why shouldn’t we be able to end the growing disparity of ownership pay to rank and file salaries, which is now more than 430 to 1?
Orwell thought 10 to 1 fair. In 1965, CEO to rank and file pay was 26 to 1 in America. In the largest 100 corporations it’s more than 1000 to 1 as of 2010. Why should a democratic country allow that? Why should we tolerate such an obscene gap?
Common sense tells us we don’t have to. Common sense tells us that our current two-party system is doing nothing about the growing inequalities in America. Common sense tells us the answer is that dreaded, off-limits phrase:
Democratic Socialism. Which equals common sense. It’s the same thing. Democratic socialism is common sense. What we have now is a system in which a tiny fraction of a minority rules the majority, and in a democracy, that’s just flat out insane.
