As I've journaled before, my work day is spent around dyed-in-the-wool wingers for whom the world is very clear cut. There is "good," which consists of Christian white men who watch Fox News, read the portions of the New Testament which support the Republican party line, and play paintball with their kids on weekends. And there is "evil," which as far as I can tell consists of a continuum. Jews are slightly evil, followed by the general evilness of all people from other countries, followed by the rank evilness of terrorists in general, followed by the spawn of Satan who is Saddam, followed by the unspeakable vileness that is Liberals, who are surpassed in their evilness only by the special extraordinary and unique evil which came down to earth in the form of Bill and Hillary.
And I silently and internally scoff and console myself in the fact that at least I'm not like that. I see merit in other sides of the story, I look for the value in points of view I don't fully understand. I am superior to those simpletons because for me the world is not binary, it consists of a diversity of culture and opinion and choice in the Hegelian sense of the word. Occassional mutations of the human spirit have resulted in horribly caustic rifts in the unity of humans and the earth, but these were and are always able to be overcome through a true reconcilliation of differences and retrenchment to those values that all humans share.
And then the real evil emerged. The evil that today, this historic day, stands to face its largest triumph, its chance to gain an eternal foothold in the fabric of our community and begin its assured unstoppable domination of the souls, wallets and livelihood of America and the World.
And that evil is
Wal-Mart.
Today Wal-Mart, through a multi-million dollar campaign of marketing, extortion and bribery, stands to claim dominion over a significant portion of the city of Inglewood, CA and its citizens. They stand to gain license to grab their poverty-stricken subjects by the throat and force them into virtual serfdom with no chance for any union or local agency to oversee or support those workers' rights to treatment worthy of human beings. They are on the verge of delineating a giant sinkhole in the economy of Southern California that will suck up any chance for a decent standard of living and just treatment for the neighboring communities and beyond. They stand to gain absolute license to trash their community's resources, with potential regional-wide impact. They are poised to exploit the leverage they have gained at the federal corporate welfare trough to entirely sap the already profoundly depressed hope for local businesses to develop with any dignity. They stand to use this license to increase the torque with which they grind their stiletto heels into the weakened eyes of factory workers in China, Haiti, Honduras, Malaysia. And to use the windfall they will gain to recreate the effort, in cookie-cutter fashion, in every community in America.
All for the name of strengthening their already iron-clad grip on the number one spot in the annual beauty contest called the Fortune 500.
Capitalism isn't the evil here. An ism can't be an evil, it is just a theory. It takes people, individual actors to bandy a theory about as an excuse for their actions. All isms can be used for nefarious purposes. It is up to the proclivity for evil in peoples' souls to use them as such.
People that work for Wal-Mart can't afford to shop there. Thus I think it is accurate to say that it contains the seeds of their own self-destruction. There is no end game, no victory. A win for Wal-Mart will be the end of the world. And the war starts today.