Wow. Just... wow.
WARNING: THIS POST IS A REACTION POST TO THE MOVIE CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY. THIS POST CONTAINS IDEAS THAT YOU MAY OR MAY NOT AGREE WITH BUT I HAPPEN TO BELIEVE IN. TAKE EVERYTHING I SAY WITH A GRAIN OF SALT, FOR I AM MY FATHER'S CHILD AND THUS PROBABLY GOING TO END UP AS A DIRTY SOCIALIST. THANK YOU.
Holy SHIT, folks. My mind is so blown. SO BLOWN. Seriously. This will not be as coherent as I want it to be. And that upsets me.
Okay. I can't help comparing Michael Moore to my own father. Both grew up supported by parents working for plants in Flint (Moore's dad worked at a spark-plug factory; my dad's dad worked at GM until he died, and then his mom worked there. I am a product of union people, and they have kept my family with a working job for as long as I can remember. They helped support my dad's family after his dad had a heart attack and got hit by a car. We have Bibles they sent my grandma.) Both are dirty liberals (my dad was accused of a liberal bias in his class that he teaches... by the head of the Republican organization on campus. Michael Moore is Michael Moore.) Both are Catholic (though now my dad is an ex-Catholic, due to the molestation cases.) Both are slightly overweight men who have moved past their blue-collar upbringings. Both are kind of loud and slightly scary in their protests. So this movie really hit home emotionally; Moore's hometown of Flint was kind of my dad's hometown too, though technically he grew up in Mount Morris.
Hearing about those things--the Dead Peasant thing and the takeover of high government positions by basically the entire section of higher-ups of Goldman Sachs (KASHKARIEWHATEVERTHEFUCK, I SAW YOU UP THERE. I SAW YOU AND I AM SHAMED. :| (Explanation: Neel Kashkari (or whatever) went to my current high school when he was in high school; generally he was considered to be a total douchebag. Last year he came back to his alma mater to speak and it was lame.))--it was kind of terrifying. More than kind of. Watching those people get evicted, hearing about the pilots who went on food stamps or sold their plasma... my own mother sells her plasma to pay for groceries. We're not poor, but we suffer exactly the sort of problems that plague the middle class. I sat there listening to the numbers of dollars of debt that most college students incur, and I realize that that is going to be me in a few years. It's terrifying, guys. It really is. It scares the SHIT out of me. My parents are in their forties; actually, my dad is fifty. They're still paying off their student debts. They might be done by the time I'm out of college. Maybe. Why are we doing this? Why is my mom selling her plasma to pay for daily living expenses? Part of it has to do with irresponsible spending on my parents' part, no doubt, but not all the blame falls on them. Something like 70-80 percent of all my parents' income goes towards education things, whether that's to pay for my brother and my's current $40,000 dollar a year education (we don't actually pay that amount, thank god; I worship financial aid people every goddamn day, I swear to God), or to pay off their student loans from their collective 20+ years of education, or to send my sister to a good liberal arts college. That's just sick. To pay for an education that right now is almost required in today's world for you to do well, but guaranteeing that you won't really be free of the reminders of that education? It makes me considering not going to college. It really does.
The representative from where I live, Marcy Kaptur, had a good chuck of screen time in it, talking about what exactly happened with the hold bailout disaster. You can see in her answers how frustrated she is with the process. This is a woman who is the ideal politician to me, who hand-wrote an answer to my kindergarten-aged self's letter about smoking, who sends my father letters weekly in response to his letters, who had a girl who used to go to my elementary school, who used to be an intern for her, become a full-time staffer. To see her frustrated with everyone in the situation--not just the people in the opposite party, but those in her own party who caved to the decision--kind of scares me that everything's going to hell. I don't want everything to go to hell. I really don't. I love my country--that is, I love the people who make up my country, and I love its rich and deep history.
It was a startling wake-up call, that's for sure. I'm still kind of processing everything, and therefore can't give a real explanation of just what inside me has shifted. So instead I'm going to end with this story about me and money.
It's normal now for a middle-class American family of five (or even four--I'm just using five because that's how many are in my family) to have two cars, but I can completely remember when my dad didn't have a car of his own. It wasn't that long ago in fact, that he took the bus to work every day. This makes sense, he works downtown and it's just cheaper, it's easier. But then something happened. One day at the bus stop downtown, some guy tried to beat up another guy and my dad stepped in and ended up getting pummeled. I remember driving down there with my mom to pick him up, and I remember him stepping out of the back of an ambulance. The bruises were kind of horrific, and it was absolutely terrifying as a four or five year old kid to watch your dad have to be helped into your own car because some guy at the bus stop beat him up. I don't even know what the assaulter guy wanted, though I assume it was some kind of botched mugging. My dad couldn't go to work for something like three days because the swelling and stuff was so bad. We have pictures laying around somewhere that my mom took for court evidence. After that, we got a second car for my dad. It's dumb, and we shell out I don't know how much a year for gas and money for Dad to park the car downtown, but I think if we sold the car I would never stop worrying that my dad would get beaten up again. How do you make that balance? How do you find a way to live safely and still be able to avoid going on food stamps? I think we were on food stamps for a little while, and my parents just never said anything. If we weren't, there was some kind of aid going on. How close are we to having our house foreclosed on? How behind are we on payments? How indicitive is it of our situation when I'm the one who calls home to ask my mom if she's paid the phone bill yet?
And yet, I left the film with a sense of hope. Marcy made a speech about how the foreclosures aren't necessarily legal--she said that if they come for your house, you shouldn't leave, and you should demand to see all the paper work. You shouldn't leave. You shouldn't do exactly what they tell you. Question them. Question authority. The rebel in me, the one that demands justice for everyone, the one that hears and feels the injustice and all the wrong being done? The rebel in me likes that. And I intend to listen to my personal rebel a hell of a lot more often.
Holy SHIT, folks. My mind is so blown. SO BLOWN. Seriously. This will not be as coherent as I want it to be. And that upsets me.
Okay. I can't help comparing Michael Moore to my own father. Both grew up supported by parents working for plants in Flint (Moore's dad worked at a spark-plug factory; my dad's dad worked at GM until he died, and then his mom worked there. I am a product of union people, and they have kept my family with a working job for as long as I can remember. They helped support my dad's family after his dad had a heart attack and got hit by a car. We have Bibles they sent my grandma.) Both are dirty liberals (my dad was accused of a liberal bias in his class that he teaches... by the head of the Republican organization on campus. Michael Moore is Michael Moore.) Both are Catholic (though now my dad is an ex-Catholic, due to the molestation cases.) Both are slightly overweight men who have moved past their blue-collar upbringings. Both are kind of loud and slightly scary in their protests. So this movie really hit home emotionally; Moore's hometown of Flint was kind of my dad's hometown too, though technically he grew up in Mount Morris.
Hearing about those things--the Dead Peasant thing and the takeover of high government positions by basically the entire section of higher-ups of Goldman Sachs (KASHKARIEWHATEVERTHEFUCK, I SAW YOU UP THERE. I SAW YOU AND I AM SHAMED. :| (Explanation: Neel Kashkari (or whatever) went to my current high school when he was in high school; generally he was considered to be a total douchebag. Last year he came back to his alma mater to speak and it was lame.))--it was kind of terrifying. More than kind of. Watching those people get evicted, hearing about the pilots who went on food stamps or sold their plasma... my own mother sells her plasma to pay for groceries. We're not poor, but we suffer exactly the sort of problems that plague the middle class. I sat there listening to the numbers of dollars of debt that most college students incur, and I realize that that is going to be me in a few years. It's terrifying, guys. It really is. It scares the SHIT out of me. My parents are in their forties; actually, my dad is fifty. They're still paying off their student debts. They might be done by the time I'm out of college. Maybe. Why are we doing this? Why is my mom selling her plasma to pay for daily living expenses? Part of it has to do with irresponsible spending on my parents' part, no doubt, but not all the blame falls on them. Something like 70-80 percent of all my parents' income goes towards education things, whether that's to pay for my brother and my's current $40,000 dollar a year education (we don't actually pay that amount, thank god; I worship financial aid people every goddamn day, I swear to God), or to pay off their student loans from their collective 20+ years of education, or to send my sister to a good liberal arts college. That's just sick. To pay for an education that right now is almost required in today's world for you to do well, but guaranteeing that you won't really be free of the reminders of that education? It makes me considering not going to college. It really does.
The representative from where I live, Marcy Kaptur, had a good chuck of screen time in it, talking about what exactly happened with the hold bailout disaster. You can see in her answers how frustrated she is with the process. This is a woman who is the ideal politician to me, who hand-wrote an answer to my kindergarten-aged self's letter about smoking, who sends my father letters weekly in response to his letters, who had a girl who used to go to my elementary school, who used to be an intern for her, become a full-time staffer. To see her frustrated with everyone in the situation--not just the people in the opposite party, but those in her own party who caved to the decision--kind of scares me that everything's going to hell. I don't want everything to go to hell. I really don't. I love my country--that is, I love the people who make up my country, and I love its rich and deep history.
It was a startling wake-up call, that's for sure. I'm still kind of processing everything, and therefore can't give a real explanation of just what inside me has shifted. So instead I'm going to end with this story about me and money.
It's normal now for a middle-class American family of five (or even four--I'm just using five because that's how many are in my family) to have two cars, but I can completely remember when my dad didn't have a car of his own. It wasn't that long ago in fact, that he took the bus to work every day. This makes sense, he works downtown and it's just cheaper, it's easier. But then something happened. One day at the bus stop downtown, some guy tried to beat up another guy and my dad stepped in and ended up getting pummeled. I remember driving down there with my mom to pick him up, and I remember him stepping out of the back of an ambulance. The bruises were kind of horrific, and it was absolutely terrifying as a four or five year old kid to watch your dad have to be helped into your own car because some guy at the bus stop beat him up. I don't even know what the assaulter guy wanted, though I assume it was some kind of botched mugging. My dad couldn't go to work for something like three days because the swelling and stuff was so bad. We have pictures laying around somewhere that my mom took for court evidence. After that, we got a second car for my dad. It's dumb, and we shell out I don't know how much a year for gas and money for Dad to park the car downtown, but I think if we sold the car I would never stop worrying that my dad would get beaten up again. How do you make that balance? How do you find a way to live safely and still be able to avoid going on food stamps? I think we were on food stamps for a little while, and my parents just never said anything. If we weren't, there was some kind of aid going on. How close are we to having our house foreclosed on? How behind are we on payments? How indicitive is it of our situation when I'm the one who calls home to ask my mom if she's paid the phone bill yet?
And yet, I left the film with a sense of hope. Marcy made a speech about how the foreclosures aren't necessarily legal--she said that if they come for your house, you shouldn't leave, and you should demand to see all the paper work. You shouldn't leave. You shouldn't do exactly what they tell you. Question them. Question authority. The rebel in me, the one that demands justice for everyone, the one that hears and feels the injustice and all the wrong being done? The rebel in me likes that. And I intend to listen to my personal rebel a hell of a lot more often.