Monday, November 14, 2011

Protest and Consume


This poem was written as a response to the Occupy Movements all around the world.  Specifically, it was prompted by a video I saw in which two girls are denied the ability to close their accounts with Bank of America because they could not be "consumers and protesters simultaneously."

The video can be found here


Protest and Consume

You say I can’t protest and consume at the same time
Well then please don’t produce
and politicize simultaneously
You erroneously walk the same line.
Your policies and decisions that shape the fallacies of elections
don’t reflect the protection I am supposed to have
over votes cast and counted honestly.
Promise me, if you say I can’t protest while I shop, then stop
using your corporate weight to throw bars around our fates.
We want upward movement, upward with the movement.

Our third world countries wonder where all those shoes went?
they just had em there, sewed them with their own hands,
shipped out of the sweat shop they’re on the feet of an American grand-standing
his Jordans through hallways for his friends….
And we wonder why corporate greed never ends…
Who wrote those Christmas bonus checks
that make me sick when I hear the numbers?
Who is out there handing you money
while the poor get poorer and the rich get number?
Or more numb.  To be grammatically correct.
But who cares about correctness when you’re talking about this mess that infects the shopping malls and consumer culture’s restlessness.

I heard the other day that families in the Congo live on piles of trash. 
Not trash exactly, but computers that have crashed. 
The old hollow frames of monitors and processors,
they strip the gold from motherboards to eek out a living,
while we just go on buying without giving a rats ass for the shitty life they lead.
And how does oppression just continue?
When it seems so many people want to tell you
how angry they are about it; sometimes they even want to shout it at occupy protests all around the world that
“WE ARE the 99 percent.  And we represent
the change that we want to see made
at the highest levels of the corporate leadership game.”

Who pays those CEO’s at the top? I know I don’t.
My salary’s too low to fit on their totem pole. 
Who could possibly be giving them all that money?
It’s actually not funny.  Especially when the answer is as clear as cash.
WE write the checks that make us vomit at the flat screen television sets.
WE pay the Wall Street workers that don’t work and make us so upset.
We dole it out one dollar at time with our Coca Cola cans and our Starbucks frappes.
The politicizing goes both directions
in these financially charged elections. 
Each dollar we spend is a vote cast for status quo
and things will never go any differently
 until we require of each other
to vote wisely with each dollar.

The richest 1 percent; they don’t have all the money. 
They have the 99 wrapped around their finger. 
They line us up and tell us lies about the popularity
that will linger around us like an cloud
if we only buy their products then we will be proud.
to live in a country with freedom of choice,
where they can feed us with noise,
enough advertising to drown out the truth
that we should be emphasizing:
The money only trickles up because that is the way you and I spend it.
And as we have spent it so we have chosen to send it
right into the hands of those that we blame. 
Greed it seems has a new name.
Look into the mirror and it couldn’t be more clear,
that you and I might protest for change,
but the way we spend our money says we want things to stay the same.