by Breht O’Shea

I’ll never stop resenting the fact that for most of us the vast majority of our waking lives is wasted away doing meaningless work for people we don’t know or like for a few dollars an hour in order to make them rich.

We have this amazing existence in the cosmos for a handful of decades before it’s lights out, and we are forced to squander that precious time mired in the mundanity, vacuousness, and tediousness of wage labor.

I work retail, and once a week the owner comes through and walks the floor. This is very high stress stuff for all the workers, including me.

He will walk in front of everyone pointing at things he doesn’t like, barking out orders, rolling his eyes when he doesn’t get an answer he wants, etc.

The rest of us are forced to walk behind him like desperate yes men, scribbling his demands on our little clipboards and trying to keep up. He doesn’t stop walking or talking, so it’s all very hurried and stressful.

At the end, when he is done, he just walks off. The rest of us shout out “thank you sir!” as he scurries away barely noticing. But our jobs hang in the balance, so we swallow our pride and do it.

This sort of crude hierarchy and subservience makes me sick to my stomach, but I have kids to feed. The arbitrary and absurd hierarchy of wealth and power is felt in every single moment of these walks.

Here’s the kicker: he inherited the business from his parents. Just by virtue of his accidental familial ties, he gets a multi-million dollar corporation and the power that comes with it handed to him.

Life is more than this. I want to do so much more in this existence, but I was born to poor parents, he was born to rich ones. So here I am following him around like a dog taking orders. It’s repulsive to my very being.

We have to fight for a better world; a world without petty tyrants in the White House and in the Work Place. A world without these fucking arbitrary hierarchies of wealth and power. A world free from the subservience that offends our very nature as free, creative beings.

A better world is possible. If not for us, then at least for our children and their children. This is why we fight, and this is why we gotta keep fighting. We get ONE life, and it flies by. Is this really how we should be forced to spend it?