I can't believe I'm the only person who hangs out here who has a corporate horror story to tell, or that I'm alone in being absolutely unable to live a cubicle life for more than 2 years.
My horror stories about jobs/work/career all center around the times I tried to be what I thought a grownup was, which meant getting a "real" job, which meant volunteering to walk through the gates of Hell, and twisting myself into shapes that crushed my heart, my soul, my body, and my mind. And inevitably ended with me walking away in one way or another, usually depressed because I just couldn't pull it off.
In other words the sane, normal, human part of me finally kicked my ass hard enough to make me pay attention to what I was doing, but the "I want to fit in" part of me kicked what was left of my ass because I failed again. I have what seems to be an inherent repugnance for the corporate world which I keep trying to erase for reasons that escape me right now.
Here's a definition of inherent that I carry around with me:
in·her·ent (-ənt)
adjective
existing in someone or something as a natural and inseparable quality, characteristic, or right; innate; basic; inborn
Origin: L inhaerens, prp. of inhaerere
Natural and inseparable, inborn, basic - like mitochondria; it's in the cells, it can't be removed or we die. Inherent Human Rights in a sane world would be freely shared by all people, because trying to remove them results in death and sane people don't tolerate avoidable deaths. It may not be your physical body that's destroyed, but your true body, the self that is you, female or male, gay or straight or trans, white or otherwise, tall or short, religious or not, fat or thin, the essential you is somehow denigrated, twisted, denied, or abolished.
I have an inherent right to be paid equally, to not be defined by my womb or my breasts, to be treated respectfully, to have my talents and gifts recognized and appreciated.
I have an inherent right as a worker to be paid for the actual hours I work, to feel secure that my retirement "contract" will be respected and upheld, that my health care benefit will provide me with affordable and excellent health care.
I have an inherent right as an employee to be told the truth about the company I work for, to receive training if promised, to earn a wage that allows me to live comfortably and safely, to object if those promises aren't kept, to be compensated appropriately if my safety is impinged upon and I'm injured.
I have an inherent right to be treated as a valuable resource, not a disposable cog.
I've never admitted this in public, but I'm a Trekkie (not a convention-going trekkie, a passionate-lover-of-the-Star-Trek-Universe trekkie). I know this is television, it's fiction, it's not real but I had an atavistic response to the introduction of the Borg that took me years to understand. I refused to watch any Borg episodes or movies, they terrified me, and it was embarrassing to even admit that to myself.
I finally got it. They represented the ultimate endpoint of the world I kept trying to fit myself into, the world of cubicles, goals and objectives, MBAs, business plans, meetings, all the paraphernalia of living in the corporate world as it exists now. The drones were role models for what I thought I was meant to be as an adult living in the real world, and I hated them.
I think Gene Roddenberry's true genius came through with the Borg world, he was warning us about where we were heading. The Federation epitomized the world he hoped people would finally insist on, a world where poverty didn't exist, where money didn't exist, where no one starved to death or died in epidemics, where we controlled our population and our rapacious demands for more of everything, where a United Federation was focused on the betterment of all not the elevation of the few.
We're far closer to the Borg reality than we want to know, and the corporate overlords are in a desperate push to get us there quick enough that we can't stop them, we can't wake up and march and demand and fight back. They've got Citizens United, and the Tea Party, Rupert Murdoch and a corporate controlled media, think tanks and ad agencies and endless amounts of money.
They want you in the hive.
And yet, with all the bricks in place, all the groundwork laid, something amazing is happening:
Tahrir Square is filled with young people who want jobs, a say in their own futures, they demand to be treated as valuable members of a functioning and healthy society, which is the overarching theme in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Palestine, the USA, and.....probably every single nation on earth.
The workers in Wisconsin are braving hours of cold weather and threats from Hosni Walker, day after day, because they're done with being drones who are bought off with shiny objects like low low prices at WalMart and a hot controversy on American Idol.
Libyans are being murdered in huge numbers by their oligarch and still, more show up to demand what they know to be their inherent human rights. They're willing to die in order to effect change.
This is so sudden and so radical I can't really wrap my brain around it being real. I thought I lived in a country that had been bought and paid for and that there was no way to motivate enough people to create an environment that would support change. I was wrong. It's not just internet geeks like me who are soul-sick about living in a corporate-controlled nightmare it's Fox viewers who are suddenly saying "Wait - this is wrong, something is wrong here."
This is a people's movement, not a democratic/republican political mobfuck. Thank the gods President Obama is staying in the background on this. We don't need bully pulpits, or stern words from the top echelon at this point. We need angry citizens waking up to the reality they live in, taking to the streets, refusing to drink the kool-aid any longer, refusing to be distracted by hot-button issues that mean nothing in the real world but do a great job of getting those fear/anger/hatred juices boiling hot enough to disconnect us from our brains.
We don't need to give the Koch/Murdoch/Rove consortium an opportunity to create RW martyrs, or change the focus from workers vs the machine to Democrats being mean to Republicans. That's been working far too well for far too long, the mechanisms are all in place, waiting for President Obama to open his mouth and engage in the game. You know the game, the one we always lose? The messaging game we can't win because we don't own the media? Stay smart Mr President, keep your mouth shut and ignore the people who are prodding you to fight back.
I feel confident that he'll stay smart, because I feel confident that aware that this is ground zero for the future. He's stuck in what is, we're all stuck in what is, and most of us want to pretend that's not true. Having to accept that the world we live in is controlled by a very few people who don't have our best interests at heart is pretty overwhelming. Extrapolating to the kind of world we'd be stuck in if we threw them all out is even more overwhelming. I long for change but I don't want the kind of change that will kill billions of people as a byproduct. I don't want to be collateral damage, or to benefit from collateral damage.
I'm willing to live with a society that's on the road to what's right, even if it isn't yet right enough. I'm too old, I've seen too much and read too much to be romantic about revolution. The bad guys seldom pay the highest price in revolutions, it's always the people who were already hurting the most, and it's almost inevitable that the new people on top will be as bad as or worse than their predecessors.
I want balance, I want change, I want fairness. I want us to transition from a world that runs on greed and avarice to a world that insists on equality, dignity, respect for the inherent human rights of every human being. I'm not likely to see that come to fruition, but I sure as hell want to be on the ground floor as it starts.
This might just be the start. It almost has to be, if Republican governors are abandoning one of their own and the media machine hasn't been able to stop the people on the ground. This might be the first time I've seen fear from the machine.
If that's true, we're going to win. If we win, human rights may actually be seen to be inherent.