Disposable Society

Living in a disposable society enables us to recreate ourselves whenever we feel the need or desire to escape, moreover, it is a concept that has developed under the mass media’s radar screen due to any number of modern factors, short attention spans not withstanding.  Some of these factors developed through technology such as society’s greater mobility through the use of the car, train, or airplane.  Add that to our modern workforce’s ability to move from job to job and company to company, thus, modern culture possesses the necessary wanderlust to satisfy the craving of any disposable soul, moreover, this plays into corporate shareholder hands and makes it easier to dissolve entire manufacturing divisions for short term profitability or outsource well paying jobs to third world countries.  This is not the only place that disposability rears its ugly head.

Twelve-step groups have sprung up like mushrooms in a cow pasture, and create another venue in which people are able to recreate themselves through the disposal of their past and the creation of their new present or future.  It is in cyberspace that people are truly able to live as they desire and pretend that their frailties and oddities no longer exist or that they are that man or woman which has haunted them throughout their sordid and miserable lives.  Sexual and corporate predators find this venue tremendously valuable in an endless pursuit of their disturbingly deviant behaviors.

This aforementioned idea of the disposable society is contrary to the usual drama we call the fast food generation or throw away generation.  Under this classification, people who were unable to digest the profound and logical instruction of their middle and high school teachers are slated for the waste heap of society.  Those of us who were able to dispose of our past and recreate our present scream past these heaps of humanity as they beg from exit ramps, corners or along downtown streets.  Maybe they are hidden among the railroad tracks as they travel in packs in a parallel universe that offers the same brisk service as any Mickey D drive through window or high speed internet connection.  As long as they stalk the shadow world, the rest of us feel safe and ready to dispose of our ugliness and replace it with a shiny new persona via the latest blog, search engine, or chat room.

It is the politicians, pundits and executives that travel in and out of the corporate culture that leave the stable, unstable and the breathing, breathless.  These are the true stars of society whose private personas live entirely separate from their public personalities.  They are the ones that commit heinous crimes that shock the world not due to the nature of their crimes, but do to the fact that their crimes are so out of character from the phony behaviors displayed during their public schemes in which they claim the pain they feel as they lay-off a huge percentage of their work force.  This way these white men are no longer forced to follow society’s rules that left them feeling trapped and impotent.

Their craving for power and authority can only be satisfied once they have satiated their need for depravity and domination that accelerates with each new encounter.  In the world of psychiatric mumbo-jumbo, these ideas are all too simplistic, and we are forced to search for the hidden meaning in all they do.  We are required to find how their delicate psyches were damaged, thus, leading to their depravity and destruction of any humanity they deem as weak or vulnerable. 

Corporate socio-pathology has reached new heights of absurdity when the needs of the few drive the operations of mammoth, international conglomerates to attack and destroy the welfare of their employees for the immediate gratification that ultimately may destroy their corporate infrastructure.  Profits are necessary and a healthy result of astute reaction and anticipation to competition within the marketplace, but this new focus on the disposability of workers, e.g., Boeing outsourcing of jobs in its latest attack on wages of blue collar workers is criminal behavior on the same level as the BTK killer.  Moreover, its impact is far deeper and the long term repercussions travel well beyond the closed production lines and workers’ families and become engrained into our civilization’s socio-psycho-pathology that expect the worst from an employer. 

At this juncture, it is requisite that as a society we reflect on the sociological and corporate changes that are attacking the foundations of democracy, e.g., the political and corporate embrace of the concept of disposability.  The fact that verbal intolerance is on the rise and the powerful are using it to attack those they see as weak because of their espousing diversity of thought and action, smacks of fascism.  These neo-conservative elitists’ use of exclusionary tactics recall the brutal and reactionary racism that has destroyed many 20^th Century Governments, and they are the heart of these attacks as they say “no” to anything but their own demented and delusional perspectives of America as prescribed by national and international corporations.

The idea of the disposability of the middle class needs to be eliminated.  The middle class needs to push back against these neo-conservative charlatans to expose their phony machinations as fraudulent and harmful to the long term health of society.  For all the ways that we have become a disposable society such as training someone in India so the position can be outsourced to add profitability, the government needs to step in as it did with the meat packing industry in the early 20^th century, and punish the lords of profitability that are willing to sacrifice American families for stockholders.