How Do I Fight "The Man"?
by The Concessionist
The Concessionist gives advice each weekend about the sordid choices of real life. Trouble? Write today.
Dear Concessionist,
I want to fight the man. How do I fight the man?
Sincerely,
Fightey McFightsalot
Dear Fightey,
There is literally nothing you can do. Unless you own a private plane. Do you own a private plane? Then FOR FUCK’S SAKE stop flying it around our ecosystem!
Other than that…
I definitely would have said you could do something, twenty years ago. But the amazing advances of evil in the forms of just 1. Dick Cheney and 2. Walmart together mean that the Ship of Change has sailed. It’s all going to be worse from here on out, on fronts both governmental and The Way We Work Terribly Forever Now, and there’s literally nothing you could do about it! It’s all elderly people making minimum wage in a big box store and the evolution of endless infowar from here on out!
HAPPY DRONEMAS TO ALL AND TO ALL A GOOD DRONE.
Still, as always, there are a few little things that will make you feel smugger until you shuffle off this vale of Tears for Fears.
• Leave New York City unless you need to be here to accumulate money for a The-Man-undermining project to execute somewhere else.
• Stop eating that trash! My God, the crap you eat.
• Probably you should never eat beef or chicken.
• Probably you should stop eating things taken from the over-farmed desert of an ocean.
• Probably you should just start eating the cricket-paste bars now.
• If you really cared you probably wouldn’t wear leather either???
• But then you also wouldn’t wear non-leather things sewn by tiny bleeding hands???
• Also eliminate your patronage of employers that don’t pay living wages, whether that’s Amazon or your corner bar.
• Be more patient. It won’t make things “better” but it does have a ripple effect.
• Don’t have sex with jerks. (This is a tough one, don’t worry about it too much.) Society improves when bad people don’t have nice things.
• Get a time machine (warning, may not work for blacks, gays, migrant workers, et al).
• Do not, under any circumstances, reproduce. You’ve got to be out of your mind (AKA, a perfectly normal human) to reproduce. You need a baby? LOTS OF THEM ARE ALREADY FULLY ASSEMBLED AND ARE WAITING FOR YOU RIGHT NOW. Hurry up and go get one! Making a new one in this world is the height of madness!
Sorry, pregnant friends. I mean, “I respect your choices”! (She among us who is without whatever shall cast the first whatever anyway. I know.) And I have met like four excellent children, and I know it’s not their fault.
But.
We don’t talk about world population like we used to back in the blessed 90s (which really WERE as good as they say), but guess what! It’s still a thing! Really a thing:
The pace of population growth is so quick that even draconian restrictions of childbirth, pandemics or a third world war would still leave the world with too many people for the planet to sustain, according to a study.
Rather than reducing the number of people, cutting the consumption of natural resources and enhanced recycling would have a better chance of achieving effective sustainability gains in the next 85 years….
…which, you’re not going to do, because you’re busy having babies, and consuming more resources together. Good gravy, even the Pope is getting on board with the idea of fewer babies.
Apart from sucking up all the food and and air and stuff (technical terms), child-rearing is also a huge waste of your own time and energy, which you could be expending on something meaningful but instead will use up responding to stupid notes sent home by your annoying school. You can’t fight The Man when little Pepper and LaBeija need help with their pointless homework. (Learning dumb stuff they really won’t need to know when high tide is sloshing around their knees all up and down the eastern seaboard.)
So parents are all useless for a prime twenty years of their lives. I know YOU all don’t like it much sometimes. But society-wide, it’s GARBAGE. Raising children with one or two parents is terrible and inefficient and rotten in dozens of ways, for all of us.
But no one’s going to fix that. So you should ask yourself the hard questions. Do you really need something made out of your own gross DNA? What if you accidentally give birth to the genetic-doppelgänger of your evil Aunt Bettina? Will you have the courage to kill your own baby if it is literally Hitler? Think about that when you are next engaged in the foul act of penis-in-vagina intercourse.
I know none of you baby-makers will listen to this, and at your drink-up playdates you’ll continue mocking the childless for our empty lives. Go for it! The only good argument you had was that there can’t be any more great homosexuals without two heterosexuals to make them, but that’s definitely not true anymore, so you’ve got nothing. Now baby-having is literally indefensible. Yes, sure, I’m going to die unattended and possibly in and/or near a gutter. But let me rebut you first by explaining in great detail exactly how well-rested I am right now. I’m going in for another eight to ten hours of sleep tonight! Oh and what’s this? These are TWENTY-DOLLAR BILLS that I am literally LIGHTING ON FIRE because I CAANNNNNN. I made all this money and time happen simply by not using my genitals!
And, if I wanted to, I could use all this time and energy to make the world a better place.
Hmm.
I guess this is the part where I insert a “Deal With It” dog with sunglasses GIF. Oooh, WHAT ABOUT THIS ONE?
Anyway.
Yeah. I know.
You want something to love? RESCUE A CAT. It’ll never apply to a $47,000-a-year college. But if it does, then you’ll get so fucking rich off that cat that nothing will matter, not even this smoldering diaper-pail of a planet.
The Concessionist is an adult human in New York City who is somewhat worn down and willing to make a good number of sacrifices for a peaceful life. Is it decision fatigue? Or just ennui? That’s probably a question for a psychiatrist. Anything else, ask me.