Thank You, Oligarchs

We're not here to eat, we're here to give thanks

Thank you Oligarchs.

Thank you for owning all the companies that delivered to me a childhood that was filled with a lot of stuff and gradually less experiences that my family could actually enjoy together. I enjoy those memories of using that stuff, though, and I especially enjoy the memories that you sell back to me in the form of storage space.

Thank you for owning all of the bike lanes, planes, trains, and automobiles. I don’t like getting to work freely. I don’t like moving at the pace of people. I don’t like sitting comfortably and zoning out. I want to be cramped and stressed and feeling like my life can be imperiled by the lack of safety of the car I’m in or the lack of sleep the pilots got. It makes me feel like I earned every arrival. I don’t like leaving no trace of where I’ve been, I don’t like feeling invisible.

If I could, I would move like you: at the speed of light, upwards forever, leaving a trail of burnt money and a forest fire behind me.

Thank you for owning hospitals and cramming them full of patients that can’t possibly be seen by the too-few workers that your golf buddies who work in PE barely pay. The crowds in there make me feel good when I go see my dying parents. I keep talking about needing to find community.

Who knew it was on the other end of my parent’s copay all along?

Thank you for owning every physical and digital information source, Oligarchs. I like it when the truth is multiple choice. Facts are too singular, too easy to remember. It’s much more exciting when reality feels like a carnival ride that I had to pay you to get on, but that there’s no amount of money I can pay you to get off.

Thank you, Oligarchs, for being the people who make all the decisions about who gets to work and for how much. I don’t trust politicians to make decisions about things like jobs. How could I? They’ve never been responsible for working in such a way that they generate more profit than they take!

And lord knows that I wouldn’t know how to manage someone’s employment as efficiently as you. I’d probably look at the person who I gave the job to, see he and I both doing the same thing - work - for eight hours, then look at my hundred dollars or however much, and then I’d seriously consider blowing my brains out if I even seriously considered taking more than $50 of that $100 for myself.

You, on the other hand, Oligarchs, understand economics. You know better than I that we need profit-makers to create jobs. That requires someone to, you know, take the profit and decide what to do with it! I'm grateful that someone isn't me.

Oh yeah, thank you for owning all the money. I don’t trust myself around it. When I come into contact with money, I mostly blow it on stupid stuff like cigars after a long day of reading your newspapers and working for your friends, or taking my friends to lunch at one of your friend’s restaurant chains when they’re sad, or paying 5% more rent every year to your other friend’s real estate management company. I know what I should do, which is it invest it into retirement products owned by your friends at the bank or, even better, into shares of your company, so then I can be like you one day instead of like me.

Thank you for owning the Earth, Oligarchs. To leave it all to nature is akin to leaving it all to chaos itself. Have you seen how vicious lions are, how barbarous the jungle is? How scary. I prefer your way of doing things: orderly.

I prefer to know exactly where my water is going to come from and who’s not going to drink it because you could sell it to me for more. I prefer to know the exact hue of white the coral reefs are likely to be by the end of this decade: Levi 514 white, to be precise. I prefer to know the exact number of children who have been condemned to work in country-sized e-waste dump sites.

With you at the helm, Oligarchs, the world so easy to predict. I don’t have to imagine what I’m supposed to do or what’s going to happen anymore with you in charge, Oligarchs.

Thank you for taking the burden of imagination off of my shoulders, Oligarchs. Now I have so much more mental bandwidth to work.