Translator

By N2H

Politics

My Journey

All of us man or woman, are on an ambiguously  termed “journey” through life. Perhaps the term itself being ambiguous, is fitting when considering that is how the journey starts, in the ambiguity of dealing with the inside and outside self. As children we are dealing with and learning about our own selfishness versus the impact of our outside world. We learn that others don’t like us to be selfish so we adapt and become selfless and forget our own needs. At some point in life, we learn how to balance this out or we either stay selfish and we don’t get along with the outside world or we stay selfless and never nurture our own inside needs. I’ve personally jumped back and forth between selfish and selfless and would like to think that I have found the balance, but you never really know until you have the benefit of hindsight.

As I have made my “journey” I’ve put less stock in ideals or religion and I have put more worth in the immanence of the little things in life. While I’m an anti-religious person, I have found moments in my life that I felt were sacred. The best example I could think of happened while serving in Operation Iraqi Freedom. When I first arrived in country, I was having a tough time reconciling my personal dissatisfaction with where my “journey” had taken me, but while flying in a Black Hawk Helicopter, I had a sacred moment while flying above the sand between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. I saw a the most beautiful sunset on the dusty mountains hitting the green around the rivers. The view’s beauty can’t really be put into words but the experience somehow made this part of my “journey” all worth while. Simplistic? Yeah. It was like I was shown a painting created by nature and most people will never see it. That was my painting. Since then I feel that I share an interconnectedness with the things around me, even if I find all things religious generally inglorious.

While others say that part of our “journey” should be to claim our pain, I disagree. I find that claiming pain is actually dwelling. To claim pain is to acknowledge it, and acknowledging pain gives it power, power to influence you to not get hurt again or to avoid pain, just like a child that touches a hot stove won’t do it again or the women who never starts another relationship because the previous one was painful. I don’t avoid pain because it is inevitable and I attempt to not let it influence me in any unhealthy manner. Sometimes I even hold my hand above a flame to see how long I can overcome my physical pain, I find that the emotional kind is just as trying.

Along my “journey” I have found my voice. It took a lot. Now a days, we are constantly bombarded with how we should think and speak. The age of the television has made it increasingly difficult to think for ones self. The ironic this is, I found my voice by allowing others to do my thinking for me. I did everything I supposed to do, I even followed what the idiot box in the living room told me to do. Those voices sent me on a quest around the world and allowed me to experience different cultures and see how different people are. It sent me to college and opened my eyes to why or how things are the way they are. These were the things that shaped my unique prospective and have developed what some would call a warped view. My voice loves to scream hypocrisy and question the status quo, but only by following the status quo was I able to achieve it.

I’ve have always taken action and have never been a content person. I used to think something was wrong with my inability to become content, but I have since realized that I shouldn’t be. I used to take action by doing what I was “supposed: to do. Part of my “journey” was taken action by serving in the military, but I did that because I was supposed to do it. I don’t regret my service, but I find more meaning now in taken action in the changing of society. This is one of the reasons I now go to college, to give me the tool I need to facilitate change and perhaps contribute to a better society. Maybe even one that doesn’t need people to go to war someday.

For the first time in my live, I feel that I live in communion, not with society but with myself. I now know who I am, where I would like to go, and I have acknowledge my limits. I am a strong brave individual, who wants to influence the world, and I the only limit I have are the ones I put on myself. This is where I’m currently at in my “journey.” That really doesn’t mean anything when you consider that next week and the week after that, I will redefine my reality and change my path once again, but in the mean time, it is a fun ride.

Wal-Mart is Turning the American Dream Into a Nightmare

At one time, many towns in the United States looked like the tranquilly that Norman Rockwell used to capture in his paintings. These towns were places were a the local man could open a store and compete with his neighbor’s businesses. Those stores would employ local families and sell goods made by similar families in an American Factory. They were not the run down boarded up shops of a below the poverty line town with a single Wal-Mart. They were not the kinds of places that would send the wealth of America over to a communist country that enslaved its people. They were the kinds of towns that existed before Wal-Mart and other big box stores moved in. Some researchers argue that, “Wal-Mart has had a substantial positive impact on America’s economy” (Hansen 4). I say that Wal-Mart severely hurts the overall economy of the United States, because Wal-Mart uses unfair business practices, keeps its employees below the poverty line, and sends America’s wealth overseas.

If you own a retail store in a town with a Wal-Mart, then you don’t need anyone to tell you that Wal-Mart uses unfair methods to destroy local businesses and eliminate all fair competition. Most small businesses start from the ground up, slowly growing their business’s over time without the use of government subsidies and are at the mercy of American job providing and prevailing wage paying factories. On the other hand, Wal-Mart received over one billion dollars nationwide in government subsidies (Greenwald). These subsidies help build roads and provide the utilities for a new Wal-mart store. These are benefits that the existing stores in an area never get from their local or state governments. Local businesses have to foot all the bills themselves, but Big-Box stores like Wal-Mart do not have to. These subsidies, along with having to compete with Wal-Mart’s overseas factories, make it impossible for the local business person to compete with the lower costing items sold at a Wal-Mart Store. In Stacy Michell’s book Big-Box Swindle:The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America’s Independent Businesses, she contends that “…the economic structure that mega-retailers are propagating represents a modern variation on the old European colonial system, which was designed not to build economically viable and self-reliant communities, but extract their wealth and resources” (xiv) In short, Wal-Mart destroys the ideals of the free market and makes us dependent or enslaves us to them.

Another reason small business can’t compete with big box stores like Wal-Mart is, Wal-Mart keeps its employees below the poverty line and relies on government programs to off-set their employees cost of healthcare and food. The average Wal-Mart clerk earns below what the federal government considers the poverty line (Hansen 5). Wal-Mart actually encourages their employees to go on programs like Medicaid and Welfare and their employees cost taxpayers over one billion dollars (Greenwald). That’s right, I said one billion dollars and there is barely over three hundred million people living in the United States according to the United States Census Bureau. Keep in mind that Wal-Mart has over a million employees and is the world’s largest employer (Hansen 2). Go ahead and add in your share of the Wal-Mart tax burden the next time you are buying one of their ultra cheap products. Now let me clarify; first we subsidize the building of a Wal-Mart store with taxpayer dollars, then we subsidize their healthcare program and their employee’s wages, and local businesses are supposed to compete with them in a free market. No wonder Wal-Mart is so profitable.

The worst part is, the money spent on Wal-Mart’s merchandise doesn’t even stay in the United State’s economy, it is sent to one of fifteen counties including Communist China, a country that treats its citizens like slaves. Wal-Mart “imported more Chinese products (12 billion) than any other retailer” (Hasen 20). I’ve personally walked around a Wal-Mart trying to find a single product made in the United States and failed to do so. According to Stacy Mitchell’s book Big-Box Swindle:The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America’s Independent Businesses, “aside from their local payroll, which typically accounts for less than ten cents of every dollar spent at a big-box store, chains return very little of the revenue they take in back to the local economy” (40; ch. 1.2) Wal-Mart thirteen of the countries that Wal-Mart does business in have booming economies and have had over a four percent annual growth since Wal-Mart arrived (Wilkerson). If that doesn’t show where our dwindling economy is going, I don’t know what does. Maybe I wouldn’t feel so bad about it, if they were not exploiting what I generously define as indentured servants. In Robert Greenwald’s documentary Wal-Mart the High Cost of Low Price, A girl employed by a Wal-Mart factory in China is forced to live in a run down dorm, she works seven days a week, over twelve hours a day, and she does all of that for three dollars a day. Go ahead local hardware store owners, try to compete with three dollars a day with no overtime.

Supporters of Wal-Mart argue that Wal-Mart has had a substantial positive impact on America’s economy (Hansen 4), that they have wrung inefficiencies out of the supply chain saving consumers money. (Hansen 2), that they are merely giving the customer what they want (Hansen 6), that low prices help bolster the nation’s economy (Hansen 4), and that property-tax revenue generated by big box stores far outweigh any detrimental impacts (Hansen 9). Wal-Mart itself has said, “Saving money is a means to helping our customers live better. By offering the best possible prices on the products our customers need, we can help them afford something a little extra” (About Us). That’s nice but when my taxes are paying for the labor and construction of a Wal-Mart, I just don’t see how I’m saving any money. I also find the idea that Wal-Mart is putting more money in consumers pockets by selling them a Chinese made pair of toenail clippers for less money than an American factory would illogical. If you are unemployed because you can’t find a factory job making toenail clippers, then you can’t afford to buy ones made in China no matter how low they sell it for. Despite what the supporters of Wal-Mart say, I have yet to hear an excuse worthy of justifying the killing of small businesses, the paying of slave wages, and the exporting of America’s wealth.

There is hope and it comes in the form of voters and city ordinances. In Rhode Island, Exeter’s Town Council voted four to zero to amend zoning so that retail stores couldn’t be larger that forty thousand Square Feet (Naylor). This effectively keeps out stores like Home Depot and lets the smaller stores thrive. “Dozens of other communities have capped retail store sizes, including Boxborough, Mass. (25,000 sq.ft.); Ashland, Ore. (45,000); Flagstaff, Ariz. (70,000); Taos, N.M. (80,000); and Stoughton, Wis (110,000)” (Hansen 8). From the year 2000 to 2005 ordinary citizens halted around 200 big-box store development projects (Mitchell x). Three hundred and fifty businesses in Austin have formed an alliance that promotes buying from local businesses (Mitchell x). If more and more towns and more and more voters follow this trend, then maybe we can take our jobs back from China and keep some of our tax dollars in our communities. On paper, the simplest thing that people can do is spread the word and not do business with big-box stores like Wal-Mart. I said simple not easy. Stopping ourselves from shopping at big-box stores might be the hardest thing for us instant gratification junky Americans to do. It is time for American shoppers to prove they care more about their country, their neighbors, and their children’s future, than they do about the convenience of shopping for everything under one roof. If you and I stop shopping at big-box stores like Wal-Mart then we support ourselves as much as we do each other. Join me in my boycott of Wal-Mart and similar big-box stores.

Works Cited
“About Us.” Walmartstores.com. Wal-Mart, 2001. Web. 22 Nov. 2009.
Greenwald, Robert, dir. Wal-Mart the High Cost of Low Price. Brave New Films, 2005. DVD.
Hasen, B. “Big-Box Stores.” CQ Researcher. 10 Sept. 2004. Web. 13 Nov. 2009.
Mitchell, Stacy. Big-Box Swindle The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America’s Independent Businesses. New York: Beacon, 2006. Print.
Naylor, Donita. “Council Rejects Big-Box Stores.” The Providence Journal. 08 Apr. 2008. Web. 21 Nov. 2009.
“US & World Population Clock.” Census Bureau Home Page. United States Census Bureau. Web. 29 Nov. 2009.
Wilkerson, Michael. “Thewal-Mart effect.” Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center. Gale, Nov. & dec. 2009. Web. 29 Nov. 2009.

Is the Right Planning a Revolution?

I’ve been noticing that the right wing in this county has been becoming very hostile. At first, I thought I was just hearing the wack jobs, who live in their mothers basement wearing tin foil hats that block out the liberal bias alien transmissions, but lately this is getting more mainstream with the people on the right. I mean just look at that billboard. People are spending money on this stuff. Unless the basement dwellers won the lottery, this is the mainstream right wing part of our country supporting this move toward a second American Revolution.

Of course we have all seen the Tea Party movement. A movement of people who protest taxes and I mean all taxes. I guess they don’t like the military, or having roads, or schools.  A movement to end the government’s taxes doesn’t necessarily mean revolt, it is only an ideal, but then you look at there website and see words like “Judgement Day.” As if the biblical ending of the world is going to happen on the day they protest.  I find such psychological use of ” end of the word” statements at least frightening if not the gears of war.

The Tea party has had signs at their protests that advertise the website End The Fed. I mean if that doesn’t sound ominous enough, check out their video I found on the World Wide Web.

I personally don’t think that most conservatives want to overthrow the government, but they need to make it clear that they do not follow or endorse a second revolutionary war. By not doing so they are actually encouraging these people and are encouraging an open revolt.

I’m curious if they can be held liable if something was to happen. I mean, if some tea party followers revolted against the United States, would their associates in the republican party or on Fox News be considered accomplices?