It happened shortly after Black Friday in Atlanta. At the Sedgwick Road SuperDuperMart an African American lady stood on the hood of her SUV and yelled "We're not going to take this anymore!"
Other shoppers, puzzled, stopped to gawk at this demonstration of obviously demented behavior.
"Screw this!" she yelled, oblivious to the growing crowd of onlookers. "The hell with big screen, Ultra High Def TV's and home security systems!"
"Cases of bottled water, doughnuts by the dozen, food service-sized cans of tuna, and multi-paks of corn dogs!"
Oh… …I must be in the wrong aisle. I was looking for…. …I forgot….
Ruchindra Gunasekara- Unsplash.com
"Here here!" cried an onlooker.
The lady continued. "I want a house to put the security system in, and not just any house! I want a huge one in a safe neighborhood with a big curving driveway and lotsa old trees!"
"Yeah! Me too!" cried another onlooker. The mood of the crowd was starting to shift. The 'demented' lady was definitely on to something, some undercurrent, as yet unexpressed by the populace.
"I'm tired of eating chicken sandwiches and packaged shrimp!" cried another onlooker.
"I'm tired of buying wine by the bottle, thinking that I'm some sort of playah!" yelled another.
"I'm fed up with buying sides of beef!" cried a third. "I want somebody to do the cooking for me!"
What was this? This strange dissatisfaction rippling throughout the crowd? Hadn't the powers that be calculated the satiation point of the populace correctly? Hadn't they tried to provide them with every conceivable comfort within their price range? Yes- they had. But these people, this mob, had been on the internet. They had been snooping around. They had been educating themselves. Now they didn't just want more- they wanted everything.
They wanted servants, like Downton Abbey! They wanted their own private golf courses, private jets, and multiple homes. They didn't want to work anymore. All they wanted to do was play. Why.... ....they all wanted to be billionaires.
Now I remember. I was looking for the patisserie.
Atared althaqeb- Unsplash.com
How could SuperDuperMart ever hope to contain this breach of formerly conditioned consciousness? It couldn't, and the company’s business model seemed doomed to imminent failure. The masses, formerly content with trifles, were now expanding their worldviews using the very tools that had been sold to them in the warehouses! They were using technology against the providers of same!
These weren't consumers anymore, they were monsters.
Suddenly, the CEO of SDM awoke from his nightmare with a start. He got on his tablet and checked the stock price- it was stable. He made a few phone calls. There were no ongoing riots at any of his chain’s locations. A lady had caused a disturbance at one of the stores in Atlanta but a cart service attendant and a few warehouse associates had quickly intervened, suppressing a possible insurrection there. Whew.
Had word of any of this leaked out, the suppliers in China would have been very worried. Their factories were feverishly producing to meet demand but they couldn't possibly meet the demand of the sudden appearance of a new class of billionaires.
After all, there was only enough to go around to support a couple of thousand or so of those people's needs.
Let’s (not) Do This
I was watching a documentary the other night about Venice, Italy, and how the city came to be. Way back in olden times the first settlers of ‘Venice’ needed protection from their enemies so they built their homes in a marsh. A lagoon. Invaders have a tough time in water environments so, over time, more and more structures got built there. Early on the structures were simple ones but over the centuries more substantial structures were put in place. It was an evolution.
The people who eventually built the brick and mortar homes that make up what we modern day folk know as Venice were far thinkers- very wise. To build properly in the marsh environment, half the cost of building a house was in building the foundation for it. First, a series of lengthy stout logs were driven into the mud of the marsh. Atop that, a platform was built. Around that platform, certain stones, impermeable to salt water, kept the inner parts of the foundation safe from decay for they lay high up enough to prevent the highest tide from attacking the platform inside. Atop the platform, the weight of the building materials were lessened in ingenious ways, through the use of arches and large windows; to further lessen the weight load the height of the buildings was limited to three stories only, and to add to the ingenuity, the buildings themselves were made flexible to not only shift along with movements in the lagoon, but to keep the walls standing in the face of the region’s frequent earthquakes.
Heya Louie youse is late for work again! Get down here and bring the keys to the front loader!
Sunyu Kim- Unsplash.com
Millions of logs were laboriously driven into the mud of the lagoon to build this city and to illustrate this, the documentarians showed a woodcut of two unfortunate Italian guys from way back, holding some sort of two man pile driver contraption in their hands. Must have been tough work, and a lot of it. An inconceivable amount.
Fast forwarding to the present day, I have been marveling lately at the amount of infrastructure that lines both sides of the road in the little town I live in, and how much damned work it must have been to put all that stuff there.
As a homeowner, people are expected to take care of every possible thing and that which they don't have the moxie to do themselves, for know how, labor, and/or safety reasons, they farm out to the army of contractors that populates every village in the land. These are the guys (and gals) that drive over to Home Depot, Lowes, Ace, or whatnot and gather up the raw materials, like the pile driver guys of old, to take care of the business of building and maintaining the town.
Every once in a while I join their ranks, to fix a faucet, screen door, door handle, lock, water filtration system, motion sensor light, etc. (minor fixit stuff) and brother, I'll tell you that that's plenty enough for me. I can't imagine getting up in the morning to do contractor work five days a week.
It makes a helluva lot of sense to me that the government or something should be taking care of this kind of stuff rather than people like me who have better things to do and I do, always, have better things to do.
I envision a future where homemoaners aren't subject to the drudgery of constant upkeep and I'm sure there are a preponderance of others that share my sentiments, though there are outliers who enjoy the process of building and maintaining and 'home improvement'. To those I raise my coffee cup and toast “Have at it, by all means!”.
I watch those incessant pickup truck putterers drive by and, from the vantage of my front porch hammock think tank, envision a future where the needs of the populace are met in far less laborious and time consuming ways.
Built in one weekend!
Randy Fath- Unsplash.com
There is a prevailing belief in American culture that if things get done via group effort (aka Amish style) that us once rugged individualists would turn into softies and would be overrun by a more determined tribe, perhaps from sly and sneaky Russia, exploitative China, or totalitarian Workadonia but I don't see the future in that way.
Instead, I see a land where forward thinkers like me- like those clever Venitians of old- solve the drudgery problems besetting their citizens (like trying to keep their homes afloat in a marsh). I see where task forces can be assembled to focus their attention on the areas where long term, as well as pleasing to the eye and soul, improvements can be made. Plans can be drawn up, budgets agreed upon, and those plans implemented- to the joy and astonishment of the citizenry- who previously thought that The Government and/or costly Private Enterprise would never come through.
In actuality, looking further into my crystal ball, I see it probably won’t be The Government that will solve the majority of the problems, it will be private enterprise, temporarily employed, to achieve an objective (or objectives) that yes, they know will run them out of that arm of their business, but the long term contracts those companies receive in return to run the anti-drudgery infrastructure that will be put into place will act as compensation for them, those contracts lasting 30 years or more (less time will be given for areas of human life that can conceivably undergo rapid change. The companies will be held under contract to adjust accordingly).
Time, as a result, free time, will explode amongst the populace, and what was once seen as desirable (single family home ownership) will become an outdated concept. Houses will be as cheap and freely available as furniture and used cars and moving from place to place will be commonplace, something easily done. Sure, the formerly formidable mortgage industry will go into a tailspin from which they will never recover but the new opportunities that people have to create, explore, and willingly contribute will more than make up for the loss in that sector.
Moving forward can be done so don't be dissuaded by any present day stuck in the mud (like those millions of logs) thinkers. The future is gonna be bright one. All that needs to happen is enough people have to be on the same page to turn this ‘less work, more free time’ concept into reality.
It’s either that, or driving every other weekend to the hardware store.
Don’t do that, I say.
Do this.