Dear Friend and Reader,
READING THE NEWS this weekendВ about a Wal-Mart workerВ who was trampled to death by theВ rush of early-morning Christmas shoppers on Black Friday, I am reminded ofВ the title of Denis Johnson’sВ play, Shoppers Carried by Escalators into the Flames,В which explores the descending madness of a family in a trailer-park America setting consumed by television, violence, addiction, poverty and most of all, consumption.
If you’ve been part of a group with a singular purpose byВ going en masse to a store, getting to work, getting your morning coffee; you’ve participated in herd behavior. InВ that settingВ you’ve relinquished your individual sense of containment and let the group ride you toward your collective goal. Your needs, as in the case of the WalMart opening, become the group’s need and the group takes over.
Wikipedia describes herd behaviorВ as a way that individuals in a group can act together without planned direction. Taken to an extreme, such asВ a violent rush of fans at a soccer match, or panic at a Wall Street selloff, or a riot at the RNC convention,В herd behavior can amplify into a headlong group rush resembling a kind of momentum-based madness resulting in injury and death.
We’ve all participated in herd behavior at one time or another. Pushing to get in queue for a bus or a subway train, cramming as many people as we can into an elevator, we do thisВ so we can get toВ work on time. Ever try toВ walkВ 5th Avenue in mid-town ManhattanВ in the height of the tourist season? Even in mellow, hyper-politically consciousВ Berkeley, CAВ where I live, the crowd outside of the Berkeley Bowl supermarketВ on a Saturday morning atВ 8:45am, fifteen minutes before the store opens, can be a threatening growl, particularlyВ during the holidays. Never get in front of aВ citizen of the People’s Republic of Berkeley when you can get a deal on bulk almond butter at The Bowl.В It could get ugly. People get weird when they wantВ what they want. But that’s small scale excess compared to Wal-Mart.В
Take a look at your typical Wal-Mart store. Or a Costco, or a Target. Ever noticed how these stores are made? I first got a clue when I took my car into the Costco parking lot to parkВ by a special accessВ pass provided the School District I work for. Walking through a dark parking lot the size of a whole city block, I saw, near the exit, the loading docks where Costco goods are delivered into the store. Four big doors, twenty-feet high, enough for the entire open end of a mac truck to insert itself like a vacuum tube and deposit its goodies. A huge thing dump.
Walking through Costco, you’re inundated with acres of tables filled with cheaply-made goods, goods presented on palettes, boxes of back-up inventory stacked thirty-feet high. As you shop, you have a sense of your own meaninglessness just by comparison with the sheer size and scale of the store. There are lines of people waiting to get checked outВ by electronic scanner, customers with big rolling palette-holding grocery carts, store card in hand. Now maybe Wal-Marts are smaller in scale, but the principle remains the same — selling massive quantities of goods made elsewhere in as non-intimate a setting as possible.В It’s de-humanizing.
I’m not excusing the behaviorВ of these shoppers for the tragic incident — they are not alone in culpability. But it should come as no surprise then, especially to Wal-Mart storesВ that the Wal-Mart shoppers waiting long hours in bitter winter cold on Black FridayВ acted with their most basic herding insincts. They’ve been trained to accept it with Wal-Mart, which was designed to herd them in, get them to buy mass quantities and herd them out. Just like cattle.
And just like any big box store where we’ve become accustomed to bargains buying in bulk, and having it all available in one big, block-sized establishment,В you are as far away from a personal accountability moment as a microbe is as far from the research assistant. You don’t exist — except for your photo IDВ card.
Yours & truly,
Fe Bongolan
It is fantastic, and yes – we have a lot of community gardens, and gardens with the schools. I’m only involved in one of them at this time, but I think we will begin to hear a lot more about the benefits during the coming years as the extension services begin to write up the results.
:). Hey Gardener:
I’m sure you’ve read about Detroit’s urban farming initiatives and a couple other inner city agricultural programs — I know Chicago has a farm down in Cabrini Green now and maybe Philadelphia and Milwaukee are farming too. Detroit is amazing. It’s half-abandoned, so the people there have moved into the empty places and started growing food. Detroit has some pretty good soil, it turns out, when it’s not soaked in sewage, but there’s a lot of hydroponics too, on property that’s practically free.
But have you read about Cuba? They’re really the most amazing of all. They were cut adrift in the 90’s when Russia went broke, and unable to import or export anything to the largest consumer nation in the world.
This is what happened:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/280951_focus13.html
~j
For what it’s worth, I find your inner city plans awesome. And visualize a day when the gates move further and further outward until they cease to exist.
Oh I left out ‘gated communities’. That was my idea for the inner city, that and have a school house that would also serve as a community meeting place. No school buses needed because everyone would be close enough to walk to school.
I thought I would die on the job if I didn’t retire early. I would have made substantially more if I could have lasted a few more years, but none of it would have mattered if I had dropped over from stroke or heart attack. Actually, I’ve had two strokes – one at 28 and one at 50 – probable cause, birth control pills and later, hormone pills. Both strokes were in an area of the brain that impacted my ability to handle numbers, which I have overcome. Never let anyone tell you that you can’t do something.
JanesD I love you, truly I do. I was thinking exactly the same thing as you when I said to myself I would have to quit the job. I wanted the money, but it did seem like a life or death decision. Lordy, it is good to eat beans and fried potatoes out of my own garden, and now I have an electric grain mill to process my own grains. Yay!
My grandfather turned in income of $12.00 during one year of the depression, per the tax records he left. They didn’t have great food, but they survived the worst of the dustbowl on beans and cornbread. My mom still talks about canning as many greens and blackberries as they could find that spring. If push comes to shove, I’m not sure people today could live that way. A depression almost seems like a certainty, and Janes I think you are right about dishes and clothes – we have enough on hand to last for the next 100 years.
People can be self-sufficient, but it will take a lot of planning and work. I’ve often thought I’d like to experiment with rebuilding a few blocks of the inner city, build a one room school for the parents to share in education duties, a community garden, enclose the whole thing in a fence so the kids can play on the streets, light the alleys and give everyone a garage to park the car, and station a guard to check IDs as people come and go; encourage parents to work at home and/or help them with small businesses; have a bus line nearby, recycling drop-offs, alternative heating and cooling systems. My local garden group has worked with one of the grade schoolsl developing a nice courtyard garden that is in the U shape of the building. They just harvested the last tomatoes, greens, brussel sprouts, onions, and cabbage two weeks ago – yet we had a frost quite early this year. The children eat the vegetables as part of their school lunches. They are so proud of their work too, in their voluntary membership in the environmental club. The design of the garden helps hold the heat, with pergolas and heavy mulches and wind protection. It can be done. Good food can be had at the price of a little hard work.
I’ve said it before, but some of the houses on a street where my uncle lived in Indianapolis are selling for $1,000 apiece, and they are really nice homes with beautiful woodwork. Part of the commercialism of the 70s, 80s and 90s, was getting people to move out of the city into homes they couldn’t afford, and part of it was drugs and poorly funded schools. Some of it was busing. Good teachers don’t want to work in the inner city, but there is no reason for the parents not to take control of the situation. 5,000-10,000 would do a lot toward restoration of some of those homes, and also put a lot of people back to work.
Gardener, you are doing it. Hooray for you!!!!!
I think I got to go back to the temp world just to see what if anything has transpired since I left three years ago. But oh my god no, they all want temp to hire now. Aaaaaaargh!!!
It’s kinduv like going into a refugee camp or something. I think I need to be able to go there and just say the things I was too stunned to say before. Payback! The terrorist temp. I wish I could cry on cue. I can act out what it feels like to cry. Ah yes, live theatre at its best. I’m starting to get into the groove. Just needed a new approach.
And JanesD, love the step by step story. Great punchline.
” Now that so many people are trying to make a living at home, they are doing everything they can to cut corners. The credit advisors are all saying “don’t ever buy a new car” and there are hundreds of blogs about saving money. The other thing is, once you work at home, you realize how much money you wasted on clothes and lunch out. I haven’t worn any of my вЂ?work’ clothes for two years, and some of the suits were expensive. I’d love to have the money back that I spent on all those clothes I thought I had to have. ”
Yeah, that’s exactly what I mean. I consider everything you said to be evidence that the setup in the corporate world is unsustainable for humanity. People just can’t go on like this.
And when I say can’t, what I mean is, Corporate America takes things from people involuntarily that can not be repaid. Even aside from the student loans, the unsecured debt to pay for the costume needed to walk in the door, transportation, psychotropic drugs, long hours sitting in cramped spaces breathing halogen; months and years spent on projects removed from one’s personal reality. You need some seriously creative accounting to justify it.
:). I love resale stores, too. I bet if every factory stopped making everything right now there would be enough stuff to go around for everyone until the end of time.
~J
” What’s sad is that schools in America were designed to instill and indoctrinate children with all the ideals of working hard. The bells, the allotted periods for this and that, the regimentation were deliberately introduced to turn rural-raised farm lads and lasses into urban wage slaves.
”
Uh huh, Brendan. I don’t think this is working out at all. For anyone — especially since the overseers are richer than god and pensions are fictional. And I don’t mean to denigrate anyone who gets up and enters Corporate America for a living. It always seemed to me that people who could do it, were doing it, year after year, were more complete than I was emotionally. I would just get so distracted by the inequality and the false reality and the institutional insanity and the…what do you call those lights they use? Hydrogen? Hallucinogen? No. What are they? The long ones? Oh, flourescent. Oh! And all that time driving a car! What kind of life is this, three hours driving a car, to sit in a box?
Anyway, I was a Human Resources Director once. This is one thing that happened: I had been working at this mid-sized company for about a year, holding job fairs and recruiting and so forth. The company had a bunch of warehouses and lots of turnover. So the owner, this lady from a fantastically rich family, called me in to her office. I sat down and she sort of frowned at me and then she said this:
” I’d like to talk to you about the quality of the people you’re bringing in here to work for us.”
I told her that we ran background checks, did interviews, got references….and she said; no, and she pulled a resume out of a pile.
Let’s call the candidate John Brown.
She said, ” for example, I wouldn’t even call this one. ”
I tilted my head. I had no idea what she was talking about.
” We’ve had trouble with them,” she said. She gave me this sort of disgusting all-knowing eyewaggle.
Are you following me? She didn’t want me to hire any black people! She didn’t want me to even “interview” any black people, because she didn’t want them in the building. And then she said she also wanted me to throw out any resume’ bearing a “funny name”. She only wanted young white Americans, blond girls in white shirts and football heroes to work for her company. College grads. White ones. No one too old.
So the first thing I’m thinking is, this can’t be happening.
And then the next thing I think is: It is happening. No one will believe me.
And then the next thing was: Fuck. I’m going to have to quit my fucking job.
~j
I think a lot of people are trying to do work at home. Here is a good place to review work at home opportunities: http://www.moneysavingmom.com/money_saving_mom/incomeearning_ideas/index.html.
I have signed on for a couple of things but haven’t followed through. I read one person’s blog who said how much she’d made just reading emails and visiting store websites. It can be substantial if you stick with it.
I have some stuff for sale at http://www.etsy.com and am doing ok there. A lot of homecrafters put their hand-made things here and do quite well. You can leave your things online a lot longer than what ebay allows and the listing fees are very reasonable. I also like the Farmer’s market for selling.
One of the reasons I retired was because of the pressure to push everyone to their limits. Fifteen years ago I always felt like I was helping people, but the last 10 years were hard because of the pressures to meet all the goals. We had wellness programs, but believe me it was just a way to improve employee opinion surveys and the real goal was to reduce sick leave. The insurance companies would love it if obesity and cigarette smoking could be outlawed. That could happen, still.
Now that so many people are trying to make a living at home, they are doing everything they can to cut corners. The credit advisors are all saying “don’t ever buy a new car” and there are hundreds of blogs about saving money. The other thing is, once you work at home, you realize how much money you wasted on clothes and lunch out. I haven’t worn any of my ‘work’ clothes for two years, and some of the suits were expensive. I’d love to have the money back that I spent on all those clothes I thought I had to have.
The other thing I’ve noticed since being home is that all the stuff I end up throwing out or sending to Goodwill is the cheap junk I bought from the Dollar Store, Walmart, or other places like that, and so do a lot of other people. Spending money at the dollar store is money down the drain. Example, today I went to the local Goodwill and found some dollar store stemware for sale at $1.99 each! I don’t understand why they price it so high. Right behind the junk was a set of fine etched crystal stemware with a half price sticker, making them 49 cents each! I will probably keep them for myself, or put out in my antique store once I open it. Junk stores become popular when times are hard because people start looking for bargains. Owning a pick up truck is another way to add to income, if you make the truck work for you.
I didn’t mean to make light of black friday shopping up in the other comment. I’ve never been to a store where there were 2,000 people waiting to get in. Walmart should have called the police to help with the last minute line-up, but then how could they have anticipated such a tragedy if it had not been a problem in the past?
hey awordedgewise, one of my gal pals has had it with the carrot dangled in front of her nose by her higher ups. She, too, is in upper management. She has finally had it and is going for bust in her latest endeavor in a publicly traded company (which makes it worse). I am rooting for her. She too works from a values base and getting work done through the people rather than constant management masturbation meetings (they’d hate to get any of us on them). Hope you are right about new leadership trends. I’ve had a long time to review all this (took a year sabbatical three years ago). I’m always branded a “natural leader” as different from an annointed leader. I am approaching the job thing differently now. What do we have to lose anymore anyway?
hey Brendan, I’ve smelled that good air a time or two myself.
Hey JanesDefense, I avoid crowds now, too. My crowd experiences come from my days of yor, when I was just a pup. It’s a wonder that I survived.
It is a fact when you have a job instead of doing your work. A job would be something you do for money. Your work would be what you like to do. I am always fascinated by people who really love their jobs.
I think that if we can get health care bennies removed from the job, things could improve. There are many cases of workers who could afford to retire at 50, 55 or whatever, but keep working until 65 or so when Medicare kicks in. These workers are unproductive moles and it is understood by everyone around them. But this worker is not inspired to work and that hurts production. Meanwhile, the job he has is somebody else’s dream job. This person would thrive through personal inspiration thereby boosting the company.
There are many people in low paying jobs they hate with great benefits for their sick mate or dependent children. They outwardly miserable and play beat up the temp games for sport.
Another thing is the salary loop. There are people on salary working mandatory 60-80 hour work weeks. This too is related to benefit expenses for additional employees. So some are working 2 to 1 jobs, thereby eliminating a job or two for someone else.
The same company decrying the high cost of employee medical benefits is working people way too many hours. Now the salarieds all have high blood pressure and heart problems and the insurance is rising so the owner walks around and takes away everyone’s junk food, like that is the problem.
And how about those wellness programs. Like they really care. They get a break from the insurance company if they have one. We all strap on our pedometers and walk through the lunch hour so we can sit down at our desks under the vent spewing fuel exhaust and chemicals from the shop in the back.
Alot of wasted potential out there strapped to a clueless system. Do we wonder why this system is imploding?
I’m trippy about the natural world and my pals all say that’s where I should be making my income. But why would I sign onto a company or corporation that will destroy the enjoyment factor? It’s my joy and sanity. And it’s free.
Human creative potential is a threat to the system. Like the crowd, once set in motion, it cannot be held back or stopped. I think it is a threat to the annointed powers. Ya just can’t control it. The world would be just all too exciting.
I left working in the corporate world 10 years ago after my entire regional office was ‘downsized’ and the ‘overhead’ reduced. We employees were the ‘overhead’ and we cost too much. Never did the air smell so good as when I was finally able to leave.
What’s sad is that schools in America were designed to instill and indoctrinate children with all the ideals of working hard. The bells, the allotted periods for this and that, the regimentation were deliberately introduced to turn rural-raised farm lads and lasses into urban wage slaves.
I wonder what Pavlov would say about the WalMart incident? Dogs waiting for the bell and slobbering in anticipation, thinking only of their stuffed bellies?
” I think about it a lot, now that I’m retired. I guess I was one of them too, and the last 10 years my family didn’t exist because I was on call 24/7 and worked constantly.”
I’ve probably thought my whole life that corporate culture — actually the experience of “work” in America was really not designed for human beings.
I think this is why so few people do it anymore. In my travels I see a lot of people who are retired, on a pension, unemployed, operating tiny internet businesses, writing freelance for a living, temping, doing something bearable part-time, etcera. I just read this morning that the jobless rate is the highest it’s been in 34 years. I don’t really hear or feel the city’s collective to be tremendously upset about that. More like, I’m laid off? Thank God.
On the radio this morning some sort of employment counselor/expert person was saying, ” Well, it’s really much better for an individual if they don’t tie their identity too closely with their work.”
Huh. Is that a fact.
~j
I have often played the covert – sometimes overt – corporate rebel. Always quick to climb the management ladder, I’ve used my “power” to give employees rights and self-empowerment as well as a feeling of well-being and a workplace to have fun in, as much as can be found.
Can I say that I’ve also always LEFT corporate positions under less than auspicious circumstances? “Interesting” lay-offs etc.
One thing for sure – My Teams ALWAYS got’ the job’ done – better, faster, smarter. I always came in under budget, BTW while still taking care of both corporate interests and customer interests — quite a balancing act, to be sure.
And was there a pat on the back for this? Not from anyone. OK. From very few. I’ve a couple of friends who will always thank me for being there for them through tough times when they were on some receiving end or another.
Most people are followers. Thank God/dess we have a new example of “leadership” (a fish stinks from the head down.)
Hi JanesD,
I think about it a lot, now that I’m retired. I guess I was one of them too, and the last 10 years my family didn’t exist because I was on call 24/7 and worked constantly.
I thought I’d try working at Walmart for a Christmas season this year, just to see what it was like and to get out of the house. The interview was for the fabric and crafts dept – pretty light stuff, right? Wrong. They didn’t hire me because I said I couldn’t lift 50 pounds while climbing a ladder. Huh? I looked through the dept and all the merchandise appeared to be within arm’s reach. I could have gone to the trouble of asking for a reasonable accommodation, but really I just thought it was my karma catching up to me so it’s easy to laugh about it. Old Sam wouldn’t recognize that place anymore would he?
I’ve been caught in that wave of being pushed forward too. I was 13 when I saw the Beatles during their first trip to the US. My cousin and I were crushed against the doors but fortunately a couple of men on the other side were strong enough to push the crowd back long enough to let us in. We couldn’t breathe! I don’t know why we thought we had to be first in line since we had assigned seats.
I saw two women fight at Kmart once several years ago, over a TV. I thought the store manager was going to have a heart attack. I have to admit I usually enjoy the black friday shopping. It’s part animal, part thrill, part Christmas Spirit, and partly feeling like you got by with robbery to come home with a 10 dollar DVD player or whatever. So before we even head out the door, we usually are armed with a plan for all the great steals and how to outmaneuver the enemy.
I sound violent don’t I? That’s what it is like to be a Mars in Aries shopping warrior. LOL.
My kids get embarrassed at times, but they still love me.
Victoria, I really don’t understand. I avoid crowds almost as a compulsion so I have no contact with this reality at all. My thought when I saw this was: Jesu, it’s a *crockpot*! You can’t wait five minutes? You really had to kill a guy to get to a discount DVD player?
~ j or A 🙂
Hey JamesDefense, glad your kid got you out of there. And you’d never work in that town again? What was that guy on? You’d never work until he needed you to fill another one of his shitty assignments.
Temping can be fun. I always like the stories about the temps who took bathroom break or lunch and never came back. The permanents always tell these stories as if they are still baffled as to why anyone would do that?
A word about the Wally crowd. Twice in my life I have been involved in the force of a crowd. One was outside a Who concert and then inside stage front (so packed and hot, people who passed out were held up by the crowd pressure) and the other an Iggy Pop concert.
In both instances when the crowd compressed I lost all control of my body movements. I was carried with the crowd. There is no way I can explain what that was like.
I found it odd that they searched the video tape to put the blame on one person. Unless they are viewing like a rear end collision when the car at the front carries the majority of the blame.
:). Eh, Gardener:
I think in Corporate America you have to learn to breathe some other kind of air than the regular kind. Lifers are covertly trained through various psy-ops to breathe something with, say, cyanide and halogen in it. The really smart ones learn to stop breathing for eight hours at a time. They step off the elevators, get two steps away and just, you know, inhale, and exhale.
That’s my theory. I developed it over a number of experiences of being unable to breathe at all in corporate environments. And I myself was never able to master the Stop Breathing All Day trick without severe side effects, such as suffocation.
My brother is the same way. He told me that when he worked for a big marketing firm downtown, by the third year he was imagining that all the stuff inside the building was on fire. He’d walk past a wastebasket and inside his mind it would just explode into flames. This was eventually all he did all day.
He’s an event manager now. He designs stuff for big parties and he gets to draw and take pictures and imagine what things will look like when they’re done. He’s a totally different person now that he gets to breathe oxygen.
It’s genetic maybe.
~j
Shit rolls downhill. The employment agency probably got chewed out by the Abbott rep for the mis-hire, so he had to chew out JanesD. No doubt Abbott was a huge client. JanesD could have gone home and yelled at the kids and kicked the dog, but the buck stopped with her and she took care of her little guy and gave him a hug. He hugged her back and said “I love you mommy.” Hurray for JanesD!
And that is why we should never let someone else influence our actions and feelings, unless there is love tagged onto the influence someplace.
It is easy to be an animal.
Lol. Yeah, Shanna. Probably practiced it in front of the mirror a couple times. Various pitches and intensities…
Girl A
” You’ll never work in this town again.”
I bet he was up all night creating that line.
OMG.
I remember my second anxiety attack. I got this idea that what I would do to make some extra money was temp during the day when my son was in kindergarten. I told the temp people I would be happy to do word processing, etc, for any small company in the area, but I wanted nothing to do with Abbot Laboratories.
Abbot Laboratories is in North Chicago, Illinois. It is a huge pharma complex. It’s like the Vatican, only it produces drugs instead of psychological illnesses.
It’s on Lake Michigan between the Naval Station and the extinct Army Base. It’s comprised of these massive stone monoliths shaped like chinese coins; staging areas where they kill the animals and grow the antigens and plan to experiment on poor people in Africa. But that wasn’t the scariest part about Abbott Labs. The thing that worried me were the apartment hives that wrapped around the campus. If you drove past them you’d easily imagine that the square footage you were going to be allotted in living space was going to coincide with your function at the Drug Vatican.
So of course the temp people tell me that they get their best contracts from Abbott Labs, and the only work I was going to get in the area as a temp was from them. They told me that if I took the contract they’d let me know when something else came up.
So the first day I drive up in my little Saturn. I walk through cubes and rectangles of chrome and glass until I meet my overseer for the day, who leads me through more cubes and rectangles until I realize I am standing in the middle of the densest, most intricate cubicle hive ever built. Fe Bongolan. Thousands and thousands of gray people-units plugged into their boxes, stacked floor on floor. It was the Borg.
I have never been more freaked out in my life. I could have been on a spaceship, abducted by aliens. I could have been a horse strapped onto a speedboat. Some girl in Business Casual sidled up to me and told me if I played my cards right there might be a permanent position available in the typing pool.
As I was getting my tour of the Borg environment, apparently back at my assigned cube the phone was ringing. This was really upsetting the other bees. When I finally arrived at the cube and prepared to plug in, they surged after me to complain, with their lips pressed together and their voices modulated. They all wanted to firmly instruct me on how to operate the phone. And when it was appropriate to operate the phone.
The phone? I raced outside with my cellphone, listening to messages. Temp guy had called. Babysitter had called. Kindergarten teacher had called. Estranged father of my son had called. My son had started projectile vomiting after a bad birthday cupcake and he was running a temp of 103.
So I told the Borg I had to leave.
I got a call from the temp guy that night. He said this to me:
” You’ll never work in this town again.”
I’m quite serious.
~j