Marx My Words

Long ago, I shouted into the wilderness, "This is all utter lee bull sh!t..."

Who woulda thunk--- six years after I first entered college and after dropping an English major and Secondary Education minor--- I would take up a minor in Sociology, only to hear my echo return to me...

In class today, FINALLY, somebody kept it real with me and told me what I always knew, but couldn't convince anybody to acknowledge; what I always wrote about and declared in silent shouts. "If you go to college to make more money or make yourself more hireable, you're only cheating yourself out of life for the sake of 'the man' and 10 years down the road you're probably going to be bitter about it and turn abusive toward your children." It wasn't a student who said this, for you so-called intellects who feel that we students don't have anything to say; it was a professor. It was a professor discussing the Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx.

And you know what? This guy Karl Marx... he's not such a bad guy, as most Americans, who barely know what communism means(or their own capitalism for that matter), make him out to be. I've always wondered why people treat economic theory like religion--- like it's a damning sin to say 'communist' or anything of that nature. But the answer's really simple: it's because Western society's true religion is money, and speaking of such radical ideas as Marx's threatens the American dream of accumulating wealth.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not some hardcore communist; I just got to understand where Marx was coming from this week after all. But it's like the ideals that I've held over the years seem to be the end result of the ideas that he set in motion. I guess you could say, since he came before me, that my thoughts pertaining to school and work are a mere echo of his voice.

How evil is that? Well... I believe in working like you do, except I believe a worker should receive the fruit of his labor while you seem to believe the fruits should go to people who sit high and barely do anything at all. I believe in school like you do, except I believe in going to school for enrichment and personal growth while you believe in going there to get a diploma for hire and higher pay. I believe in family like you believe in family, except I believe in strong families where work isn't a hindrance but a part of the home, and you believe in families disjointed by the need to labor away from home. I believe in sacrificing the wealth of the few for the good of the whole; you believe in hoarding as much as one can to himself, knowing most of it will never be used productively. I believe in being resourceful and using resources wisely; you believe in wasting resources to generate more revenue and expanding to new sources when old ones are exhausted by irresponsibility.

Futhermore, I believe the Bible like you believe Bible; I believe when God said, "store up treasures in Heaven" and "labor not to be rich" and "the laborer is worth his hire". But you don't really seem to believe those things, because if you did, then you'd see something is amiss in our way of doing things.

This post isn't me declaring myself a communist, because, like I said, I JUST got the real gist of it within the last 2 days. All I'm saying is that, for once, I actually have some "recognized" support for these wild ideas of mine in the form of a social theory professor and one of the most feared (perhaps unjustly so) men in history. I haven't felt this type of satisfaction for quite some time.

BREATHE, It's Only a Red Scare! B-J