Last night was too cold. If I was walking around a city and enjoying the day as I did both yesterday and today a bit, it would have been perfect weather, ushering in Autumn with the only thing missing being the fact that Autumn belongs to a northeasterly city with a coastline and a baseball team named after dyed undergarments. However, when my day of wandering and conversing and being interviewed for things that get my hopes way too up was concluded, and I was venturing to fall asleep, it was too cold. So tonight, I decided I would give myself a chance to escape. I drove a ways away, spent more money than I can probably afford on the cheapest motel room I could find, and locked myself inside. It's not too cold in here, at least not in the same way it was last night. Soon enough, though, I'll have to leave.
I'm too poor for this temporary place. I'll be too poor for an apartment pretty soon, if ever I find one, even with the income that will soon be segmenting a tiny portion of its made-up worth into my somewhat reluctant hands. At a job I can justify as its cheap prices make the so-called necessities cheaper for those who can't afford better, I am an ant in a long line or a cog in a machine or a single thread of a long rope, mindlessly rearranging the hand-me-downs of the middle and upper middle classes's overweight children. As much as it's been pounded into my skull lately that I must survive and that to do so requires I pay homage to the gods of consumptive materialism, I do wonder if even the seeming moral benefits of my position compared to other areas of employment are not fallacies as well.
For instance, working at a thrift store, the prices of the clothes are marked down drastically from what they would be sold as new in the mall or at a department store. I don't know much about fashion (and I sincerely hope I never do), but it seems like in the time it takes for the clothes to go from new to thrift status, there would be some cost to their fashionability. There is also anywhere from a barely noticeable to a severe amount of wear on these clothes, marking them, at least to a certain extent, as second-hand. However, staying true to their origins—and especially show because I've been working in the kids' department of late—the clothes are in no way lacking as billboards for advertisement, whether that be copyrighted characters or logos from various brands (in many cases, both).
What does this say about our culture then? Perhaps that we are doing something to reuse materials and not be wasteful. Perhaps that we care for the poor in society and have found a way that is mutually beneficial—clothes for them, pocket-change for us—to take care of a social issues. Perhaps that we have chosen, in the guise of benevolence, to fall on the side of the wire which believes that to help the least of these is to dress them up like us but not enough like us as to be indistinguishable. They can wear the clothes of a higher income level but a few months after those clothes go out of style and only once we've worn them down to a shabbiness fitting poverty and misuse. We're not allowing others to reuse the material goods we love so much, we're recycling them, making them into something new—the uniform of the have-nots.
To pay for my supper and someday a roof over my head, I'll go into work tomorrow, stand on my feet all day, and sift through the racks of your children's hand-me-downs and leftovers so that some ghettoized toddler can have a stained jacket with Buzz Lightyear on it or a game of Don't Break the Ice with most of the blocks missing. I'll justify it for the moral reasons, but mostly for the personal ones. It was too cold last night, I'll say to myself, hanging up a pair of early 2000s designer tween jeans. I don't want to go hungry in a month, I'll muse, unlocking the cabinet where we store the knives and old video games. I hate sleeping in my car, I'll complain to no one listening, trying not to sing out loud to the barrage of pop music coming in over the store radio.
At the end of the day, I'll be dead tired, having barely thought a meaningful thing for the past 8 hours, and wanting so badly to create something but hardly able to even put two words down. I'll get in my car, lean the seat back, pull up a blanket, know exactly why I'm doing it, and still be unable to tell myself it's right.
'Cause in the end, I'm gonna say I disagree with a system that puts looking good and having junk above being good and creating art. And in the end, I'm gonna have spent too much of my life participating in that system anyway. Show me a groundbreaking philosopher whose ideas spat in the face of traditional society, and I'll show you the ISBN code on the back of their book.
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