The thing is this

By Gregory Stephens-North

The thing is this. I am writing to you because there is no one else I can trust. I have to keep it pretty short. They might able to see me writing this now. I don’t know. They can probably only see things when I am connected. But that is most of the time.

I know something. It’s really important. It explains A LOT. Before I say more I have to back up. To understand, you have to hear this from the beginning.

It starts with our jobs. We go to them. Why? Because we HAVE to. Why? Because we need THE MONEY. Why? Because we need it to BUY THINGS. Buy what? Everything. THEY want us to buy everything. Why? Because if we don’t, everything stops. I mean everything. Think about it. Our jobs are based on the idea that somebody else wants the STUFF we do at work. It’s a big shell game. The moneys always moving, round and round, and it can never, ever stop. If people stop shelling it out, stop betting on the moon, like back in 1929, then CRASH, no more BOOM. They don’t tell you that in school. They don’t want you to know you have that kind of power. But you do.

Okay, so you like your job, great. I am happy for you. A lot of us like what we do. I do. But sometimes I sit in the conference rooms in these important meetings and listen. I mean REALLY listen.

The things we say. They sound great to us when we use the names, names of our products, names of our competition, names of the customers WE want that THEY have. But take out the names and it gets weird.

THEY have IT. WE want IT. If WE work fast enough, we can beat THEM to IT. We mix names and numbers. We need to be Number 1 by Q2! Six Sigma means more EBIT! It’s a kind of catechism. We say these things because it makes what we do sound important. But it’s not. It’s a job. It’s where we get MONEY. So we can buy STUFF. The STUFF they make at JOBS.

But you like STUFF, you say. Sure you do. So do I. I like all kinds of STUFF: books, CD’s, and DVD’s are my favorites, which means I have to buy bookshelves, and CD towers, and DVD cabinets and TV’s and CD players and DVD players and things to clean furniture with and things to clean CD’s and DVD’s with and things to fix worn out CD players and DVD players and speaker stands and home entertainment centers to put all of this STUFF in and on. Yeah, I buy lots of STUFF. I spend A LOT of MONEY every year, so I have to make A LOT of MONEY every year. Usually I spend more than I make. A lot of us do. That is where credit comes in. Without it, we would have a lot less STUFF. That is why THEY invented credit. It’s a needle they put in your arm. The sucking sound it makes is your soul.

Okay, okay, maybe I am getting a bit carried away, but THINK! There all whole companies that do nothing except hang around and wait for you to go into debt, so they can charge you INTEREST. If YOU don’t, THEY can’t. But you do and they do just fine. Financial services are HUGE. They make VERY big bucks. Companies that used to MAKE STUFF are now more interested in selling it to you so they charge you interest on what you owe them, because that is where they make the BIG money.

But what if you stopped? What if you bought the things that you need and nothing more? Forget the TV ads that say you NEED this deodorant. Forget the little box up in the corner of your browser that says you NEED this vacation package. I know this is hard, but you don’t even need that TV or this computer. All you need is food, clothing and shelter, but not THEIR food, not their clothes, and not their shelter. What if the food you bought was just what you needed so you wouldn’t starve? What if you didn’t buy clothes and shoes until your old one’s wore out? No more Diet Coke. No more Gucci bags. Just stuck with the STUFF you needed to survive: a roof over your head, three square a day, a couple of shirts, a pair of pant, three pairs of socks, and enough underwear t o make it through the week. What if you only had as many rooms as you could reasonably keep clean without any help? What then? How much money would you have that you don’t? What would you do with it? Could you do without it? Hell, most of the STUFF in our world wasn’t even invented a hundred years ago. People made it through the day somehow back then. Kids raised that way made the world safe for democracy, not too shabby. Maybe you don’t need that GREAT JOB. Maybe there is something else you REALLY want to do.

Like what, you say? Well, think about it. I wanted to write, but I stopped. You know, starving artist and all that. Had two kids (now three) and that meant I had to go out and make LOTS of money. So I did. Soon as I was spending so much time making money for them that I didn’t have time to see them. Now I have so many commitments, so much depends on me at my GREAT JOB that I have to stay. If I left I would be letting THEM down. And I need A LOT of money, because I buy LOTS of STUFF.

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Wait a minute. I am not logged on now, but I am connected. I wonder if they can somehow log into me. Wow, I am getting paranoid. But that’s good. Fear is your friend when things are not what they seem.

You still there? Good.

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I can remember the pictures, pictures of me as a little boy. I was always getting stuff. They indoctrinate you early. Birthday parties, Christmas, vacations. There was this one picture with my little brother and me. We were riding around Christmas morning in our pajamas in this surrey. It was a real live surrey, red, with white seats and a red roof with a fringe on top, big enough for four. It was like a bike, you pumped it. We were beaming. It was VERY cool. We grew up getting STUFF like this, like we deserved it. We buy STUFF like that for our kids, like they do. THEY even have a name for this sense of deserving it, of needing to live like we do. THEY call it STANDARD OF LIVING. Standard, you know, like on cars. Standard is what you get, just the basics, nothing special. So we have a STANDARD for living that is our birthright. Nothing special, it is the way we were born to live.

And it takes A LOT of money to feed that standard. And it takes A LOT of energy to feed that standard. And it takes A LOT of our time to feed that standard. And in the end, THEY get what we pay for.

Yeah, THEY. I know how that sounds. It sounds crazy. Like I think they are watching me and that they are everywhere. Well they are and they are. You don’t believe me, I can tell. But it’s true! I’ll prove it.

Over on my dining room table is a large stack of mail in various stages of being opened, read, and processed. There is not one single letter from a friend or relative in it. Okay, I know, it IS snail mail. You always e-mail me and so do just about everyone else these days. But THEY send me e-mail, too. AND they send me LOTS of snail mail. Bills, and offers to let me join their club or choose their service, or use them to help me pay my other bills so they can send me their own bills. Offers, save this much versus the other guy if I spend what I earn from THEM with THEM. See how they keep it all to themselves? What you think you get when you work you are just borrowing from them until you spend it back. THEY will do almost anything to keep you from keeping it.

Take sex. It is the one thing THEY KNOW you are always thinking about if you are guy, like me. So whatever they want you to want they make it sexy. Except sex, which isn’t very sexy they way they present it to you, like on the ‘Net, but they don’t care there because THEY know you’ll buy it because even though it is not sexy, it is sex.

And the sex thing is for girls, too, only it’s different. With us guys, THEY know to keep it simple: babes with big boobs. But with girls, a bit more subtly is required. They get MEN with tousled hair, keen eyes, a slight smile, a five o’clock shadow, square shoulders and a nice butt. These guys seem dangerous, but also somehow VULNERABLE. Women NEED men who NEED them. These guys wear button downs and dockers and women buy cologne to smell good for them. These guys wear t-shirts and jeans and girls buy facial creams to scrub up for them.

So the sex thing works. THEY know that. They have harnessed our instincts, our hormones and made them work for THEM. Just like we do.

There’s more. There’s the drug thing. Not like heroine, I mean REALLY dangerous STUFF. STUFF you get hooked on and nobody hauls you away, nobody even really cares, because everybody does these drugs. Drugs like sugar, which is in just about everything except when they replace it with Aspertame, which is in everything else. Sometimes they mix them up. You get caffeine, another drug, with sugar and maybe milk. Yeah, dairy, creamy, yum. Order a coffee with cream and sugar and you are in THEIR heaven. THEY know you will come back for MANY more. They now it so well that they put a coffee shop on every corner, just like the gas stations. They even have started putting coffee shops in gas stations. Now THEY can have YOU filled up while you fill your car up. Your car can’t run without the gas. You can’t get up without your coffee. They sell you the car so you will buy the gas. They sell you a cool cup so you’ll have somewhere to put the coffee. Then they put a cup holder in your car so that you have someplace to put the cup. It’s like selling you an arm so you will have someplace to stab the needle.

But you NEED that car! Without it you can’t get to your JOB! Without it you can’t get to the grocery store. Without it you can’t pick up your kids from the MALL. See? They even have the towns set up so you can’t get what THEY have made you think you need without buying more STUFF from them.

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Are you starting to get it, now?

No? You’re not even listening.

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You think I’m nuts, all this talk of THEM, like there was really a THEM, not just a bunch of people like us, trying to get by, but somebody who is out to get us, somebody bad. Right. Sounds crazy, I know. I used to think I had just stayed up too many nights, watching too many infomercials, surfing too many weird web sites. That I had so many bad habits that I needed someone to blame. So I made THEM up, so the problem was with them, not with me.

But the more I thought about it, the more real THEY became. They weren’t one THEM but they were all part of THEM whether they knew it or not. That is the trick. That is why YOU can be one of THEM and not know it. At some point I realized I was.

It started with logos. Every time I saw a logo, I knew it was like a two-way window with THEM on the other side of the NIKE or COKE or MOBIL or FOX sign looking through it at me. They were working on me. I was a project of theirs. They need to know what I want. They want to give it to me, at first, just a taste. When they see that I want more, that I am hooked, they start charging.

There is a meter running. It belongs to them. For every second you live like you do, they get more.

And then I knew. It was suddenly clear to me one day, while I was standing in the middle of the Mall, that I knew. I didn’t have to buy ANYTHING. I could just go sit down and watch, watch everybody else buy everything. And they did. And I watched. And I knew. Then I left.

I was scared driving home. I wanted to stop and buy something. I needed more room for my books, that was it. I always could use more bookshelves. So I stopped at Wal-Mart, but something told me that the pre-packed screw together STUFF there was TOO CHEAP. So I stopped a little bit further down the highway at Ethan Allen. But something told me that the tongue and groove constructed, green and brown, Eddie Bauer colored maple set was TOO EXPENSIVE. So I headed home, past a hardware store and then I remembered. My dad had an apartment once. He had lots of money. But he didn’t want THEM to have it. He wanted to keep it. But he liked to read A LOT, too. So he bought boards and cinder blocks. And he stacked the blocks between the boards and he had shelves, strong and cheap. And he built them himself, not bought them from THEM.

And then I really knew. I had to sit right down and write you this so you would know that I know and so that you would have a chance to know, too.

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What? You don’t believe me. Why am I not surprised.

Well, like I said, I can prove it.

Try the experiment that proved it to me: try to stop.