“Don’t talk to Strangers.”
Mom & Dad
The dark car rolls up and the window slides down…
“Hey kid! Want some candy.” You like puppies, right?”
“All I need is your name, address, phone number and you’ll need to initial… right here, and sign here…Aah, don’t bother reading it, I’m a good guy. Trust me.”
It’s nothing personal.
Just business.
CEO – Easy Street, INC.
The Corporate Stranger
The corporate stranger, especially the lusty, amoral and antisocial corporate stranger, is a good metaphor for attacking the problem of corporate sponsored public policy.
Corporate strangers spend billions to tell us how nice they are, billions to tell us how good they are for our ‘community’, and billions to make us feel comfortable with them. The corporate stranger wants us to trust him.
http://www.geocities.com/EnchantedForest/Dell/9779/Strangers.html
“Outside the Hundred-Acre-Wood there are many, many people,” said Christopher Robin.
“Hundreds?” asked Pooh.
“Thousands and thousands,” said Christopher Robin. “Most of them are nice, but a few aren’t.”
“How can we tell who’s not nice?” asked Pooh.
“We can’t tell the difference between a good stranger and a bad stranger by looking at them,” said Christopher Robin, “so we should never talk to any strangers.””That doesn’t sound very friendly,” said Pooh.
“You can always be friendly with your friends,” said Christopher Robin.
“It’s nice to be friendly with friends, smiled Piglet.
“Yes,” said Christopher Robin. “But you should never be friendly with strangers.” [emphasis: mine]
Mom’d Be Pissed!
Americans are trusting our families’ health, wealth, wellbeing and future to complete strangers: fake people we don’t trust, that don’t care about our wellbeing, that have nothing on their mind’s at all but the bottom line:Grow or die.
Complete strangers spending fortunes to woo us to them, to tell us how good they are, and to tell us how much they care while they exploit our people and rape our land.
Should we really trust those kinds of people?
It’s stirring when you think about it:
Fine print that nobody reads, open ownership of and access to personal information, health, wealth and well being of our families? All entrusted to kindness of corporate complete strangers.
What the hell are we thinking?
Complete strangers select our ‘electable’ politicians.
Complete strangers inform our nation.
Complete strangers bankroll our elections.
The Corporate Stranger, a complete stranger to the People, does not care about our families.
People are just the chattel of the marketplace. Human resources and consumers; we’re product and future profit streams to be owned.
Moo!
I make it a point to not put my faith in the good intentions of strangers, especially when I’ve already seen that the stranger does not care how his actions impact people.
The fact that we’re nothing more than numbers: costs, assets, liabilities and potential profit, should be eye opening for us.
Nothing personal, It’s Just Business
A stranger that does a cost benefit on your life, on our children’s lives, to see if he ‘cares’ needs to be watched like a hawk, not perched in the hen house.
We’ve got to stop trusting complete strangers to do the right thing for us. Strangers don’t really care about you. It’s nothing personal.
We’ve got to look out for ourselves. We’ve got to look out for our neighbors, friends and family. We’ve got to look out for our future. Our future is personal.
It’s time we start to dedicate time and effort to those close to us, those who care about us instead of to complete strangers.
Thanks for this k9. You’re right, the future depends on us. Trust is a subject we should all think about. Strangers can be trustworthy or not. By their actions we can judge.
Despite being handicapped for the rest of my life by an uninsured driver in a brakeless vehicle, I still find myself depending on the kindness of strangers. Usually they will obey traffic signs and help with doors. I have discerned those people I know are not to be trusted, but generally speaking I am safe.
I think it’s time for us to take responsibility for the service we owe each other as members of a society and stop wasting our time blaming other people for the state of our world.
What a great comment, Alice.
Totally in the spirit of the frame.
trust and responsibility.
I know there is a disconnect between progressive values and asking that we be wary of corporate strangers, but it’s important that we give them the kind of hard look we need to as a society to protect ourselves.
We’re getting gobbled up by their appetites.
Yes indeed, we have let our appetites run amuck. (she said, brushing off the cookie crumbs)
I am almost completely anti-corporate, but do have a good memory of one corporation that served my family well.
My father used the GI bill to get an engineering degree, and was hired by IBM in 1953. He earned a good living from them, and with mother’s help managed to send three children to college, and one to live abroad for a year. IBM maintained a country club for employees, where we could do sports, take all kinds of classes and have occassional parties together. The company was started by pirates, but did manage to exist on a human level. Dad wasn’t in a union, but most working people were.
Nowadays, in my dealings with any corporation, I persist until I manage to elicit a human response. They are not all bad, but need to be adjusted under the law so that profit is not their sole reason for being.
Maybe we all need that adjustment.
Again with the language, Alice…
“They are not all bad, but need to be adjusted under the law so that profit is not their sole reason for being.”
Adjusted… good word.
Thanks…
There’s an uncredited “quote” floating around that says, “who are you gonna trust, me, or your own lying eyes”?
It’s sad just how much we don’t trust our own sense of what is right and wrong. We’ve been schooled not to trust ourselves, but to defer to the opinions of the powerful.
Another quote that comes to mind is from Maya Angelou: “You should trust people when they tell you who they are”. Here, of course, she’s not saying that you should take people at their word, but that most people’s actions are a clear indicator of their beliefs and intentions. In essence, that people “tell us who they are” just by being themselves, and that we should believe what we see.