Sunday, October 23, 2005
Franchised to death
In the forty-one years I have roamed around the sun I have been witness to the crash of our capitalistic system. We have sold our very lives to the decentralization of our common wealth from our own hands to those who do not have our best interest in their heart.
I remember when I was a wee tot my parents would travel by car with me to see what was over the next hill, and then the next hill. They had very long accumulated vacations as reward from the company they had been loyal to for a combined half a century. The only reward they received in the end was watching their pensions evaporate and their workplaces move to Mexico when they were too old to recover.
We would travel and visit State after State and Town after Town by the highway system and meet locals in their Shops and Restaurants that were unique to their Counties. When I remember those times they seem like another Country altogether. I was fortunate to have received this education in common American life of that time.
I found I had acquired a spirit of the same open road adventure by my sixteenth year and explored my home valley by automobile. In my eighteenth year I wanted to start exploring the Country for myself. I wanted to find that same America my folks were intrigued with. My vehicle was going to see shows by a certain band that played a different set list in every city with a micro-society of nomadic fans.
I started to notice the change in our country in the late seventies and then in the early eighties. My parents would tell me of special places I should visit while I was in a certain city that I found were no longer there. That special eatery was now a McDonalds or a Taco Bell, and that really nifty shop was now closed while the locals would gladly point to the new Wal-Mart out by the interstate by-pass.
In the late nineties I started to notice a change in the way this franchised businesses world was affecting our local economy as our local leaders also were dying off to a new breed of leadership that had no real interest in our community. These leaders were imported from a multitude of other places and had no family roots in our town. The leaders started to make decisions based on money and money alone. There was no financial reason to keep the people who were serving in positions that seemed lowly when they could be replaced by an answering machine device, or other tool.
In the overall quest for utopia it seems we have found the masses of humanity with idle time in the Devil’s workshop to be hooked on the wears of Walgreen’s. When all that is needed in this writer’s humble and un-educated opinion is something useful to do with his or her time that gains him a livelihood.
A poor man measures his gold by the weight of his toil for it, and a rich man measures his gold by the weight of many other men’s toil for it. The rich and powerful had best find a way to good stewardship of this gold before it is too late or he will see his foundation is washed away and will have the toil on his own bones to bear.
I am Tennessee Jed; Self-proclaimed Prophet of the Obvious without the letters of accomplishment posted after my name my opinion means little more than rambling. I am not a Socialist, but I am a social creature in need of help as I offer help. I could write thousands and thousands more words on these simple observations, but I will leave that to those who have that job to do. I only strive to not worsen matters and live another day.
:: posted by Tennessee Jed, 1:01 PM
