Some marital manifestations of the dreaded socialist scourge.
Joint checking accounts
Shared goals
Investing in infrastructure
Redistribution of wealth
Focus on love over return on investment (ROI) and short-term profits
Government force
We need to form a militia so I don't have to iron!
Teamwork
Equality
Collaboration
Collectivism
I encourage you to remove all aspects of socialism from your marriage at once!
Other things that are socialist
Traffic lights and stop signs
Big government is oppressing me!
No shirt, no shoes, no service signs
I wanna do what I want!
Our country
It’s not our country. I’ve got mine and you’ve got yours. Stay on your side!
Corporations
A bunch of people coming together to create something? Socialism!!!!
Laws
I want to kill people! Your big government is infringing on my individuality.
War
Quit forcing me to fight against people I don’t want to fight against! Socialists!
Work
You mean you want me to work with other people? Can’t they create wealth themselves?
Church
Altruism is evil! Doing good never generated any wealth!
Boy Scouts/Girl Scouts
Teaching kids to work together might lead to socialism!
Team sports
Working together and distributing the ball to other people ... disgusting.
Schools
Indoctrination! Working together!! Socialism!!!!
Hanging out with friends
Why aren’t you working and acting in your own self-interest! Get back to work you socialist collaborators!
Democracy
Look … didn’t I already tell you? Democracy was great until I got mine.
If corporate special interest groups want it, it's "freedom". If you want it, it's "socialist".
I think you get it.
The term “socialist” is a generic marketing term used by corporate media to push an agenda (which is typically avoiding paying for something … a war, a bridge, education, services that we all use, our country, etc).
Here, I'm simply playing with the term to describe marriage.
In America, paid marketers and corporate special interest groups inject this term daily into our media for one purpose and one purpose only. They’re being paid to protect the wealth of a few people who have come to own our country. The wealthy are afraid that if we ever realize just how much of the country they own, that we might not like it.
So they brand everyone who speaks out as "socialist" or evil. And they recruit people into the fight by painting obese centralized wealth as somehow natural and beatific.
Yet somehow when the wealthy buy our government to privatize profits and shift the risks and costs onto everyone else, we are being "freed". If working more and more so someone else can make more and more leaving me with less and less is "freedom," I would like something else please.
Helping the poor is no more "socialist" than traffic lights. Why is one somehow OK and the other not? Why is working together in corporate groups or churches OK but we can't work together as a country?
Don't take them seriously.
What they mean is that what corporate special interest groups want equals "freedom" and what you want is "socialist". War = freedom. Helping people = socialism.
So if someone is going to play this game, have some fun with it and ask about all the socialist aspects of their lives.
Every time they’re not acting individually, any time they’re working with someone else or collaborating towards some shared goal, ask them if they’re socialist.
Ask them why they stop at traffic lights when clearly these are put in place by big government. Ask them why they want to force people to go to war – isn’t this socialist?
Ask them why it’s OK to collaborate with people at work, but not in communities. Ask them why they go to church when clearly these organizations have the socialist goal of bettering society.
Point out all the socialist aspects of their marriage. Every group and every interaction that isn’t purely individual is socialist.
I could call my wife socialist and she could call me socialist. I don't know as this would be the most successful relationship.
Or we could realize that we’re married, we have shared goals, we’re part of many different groups that work together, and we live in a democracy.
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David Akadjian is the author of The Little Book of Revolution: A Distributive Strategy for Democracy.