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DESK BOSS
WHAT I REALLY WALJTED TO SAY
MARKMATCHO
BY GINNI CALLAHAN
Please accept this as my letter of resignation. I am
leaving because I believe that industrial corporate capitalism,
which includes but is not limited to this retail company, damages
the health and integrity of our natural world and our human
relationships in order to achieve a profit. By working for and
receiving a check from this company, I am guilty of furthering
this irresponsibility.
While pursuing a profit is as natural in a money-based
economy as gathering food in a subsistence one, our country
has achieved excess. This wealth has leveraged us into a
globally unchecked capacity to control and destroy people,
ecosystems, other cultures, and even ourselves without
beginning to understand what it is our money has given us
power over or that we do indeed hurt others and ourselves
with this power. Industrial capitalism's current goal is to pursue
unlimited economic growth as if the resources of the earth and
its capacity to assimilate refuse were unlimited as well. This
goal is incompatible with sustained life on the planet, let alone
harmonious life
The earth is a finite place. Increasingly, Americans seek
international resources because our demands exceed domestic
supplies. Historically, America’s wealth was built on the wealth
of the land, spurred by favorable ratios of resources to popula
tion. Anyone from fortune seekers to homesteaders could farm
acres, graze thousands of cattle, mine anything any way, or cut
unlimited trees without visibly upsetting any balance. Over the
last 200 years, the population has increased. Today our habitat
must support more people. But not only has the population risen,
our rate of consumption, known as standard of living and boost
ed by mechanization, has risen dramatically in that time. On a
graph, add the upward curve of per capita consumption to the
curve of increasing population, and the demand on the land
skyrockets, as does the interpersonal competition for its wealth.
I am not advocating a different system. I don’t believe
any system can be infallibly executed. Neither am I insisting that
our current cultural/economic system is completely without
redemptive qualities. It has good points. The real beauty of a
money-driven system is that some power, however unchannel
ed, rests in the hands of the frontline consumers —the everyday
citizen: us Whereas democracy gives us a voice to vote with,
a voice that can be muffled and distorted, capitalism gives us a
hand to push with. When we are conscious of this, we can make
informed purchases, or boycotts, and exert quite a shove. Also,
capitalism is fueled by individual ambition, and this is a good
energy to tap when it is restrained by conscience. Neither wealth
nor growth itself is inherently evil, but being enamored of them
enables us to be ignorantly destructive. That is the danger, and
that is what I promote when I encourage customers to, no matter
what, buy.
Let me explain the term “industrial corporate capitalism"
as I am using it. Capitalism because here power follows money
as opposed to following military strength, for example, or land
(I am not advocating either of these). Corporate because holders
of sums of money, hence power, are often companies not indivi
duals, and decisions are made by groups of people. While this
situation can mitigate an individual’s abuse of power, it can also
disguise it, and muddy waters when questions of responsibility
and morality arise. Thus corporate capitalism, as I am using the
term, denotes control in the hands of big business. I have added
industrial because that is the mode of operation. That is how our
goods are made and food produced; not manual or personal but
momentous and aggressive. In terms of the land, industrial often
means extractive, taking without replacing in a one-way flow of
energy. The powerholders ride this animal industry, in which the
workers are the organs and muscles. This beast is a voracious
consumer of resources and often a dirty polluter. However, using
this overstated metaphor tempts the accusation of the equest
rian and the pardon of the ass, and that would be inaccurate, for
the frontline consumers — us — wield power with every dollar
we spend and every job we accept. I am responsible, too.
Usually, an individual’s decision to buy comes after
assessing only the dollars in his/her pocket or line of credit.
Can s/he afford it? Yes, s/he can get the money But this tally
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is incomplete. Behind many comforts, foods and manufactured
products are costs and consequences which are often over
looked. They are social, personal, environmental, and arguably
aesthetic and moral. They show up in our relationships, our tap
water, our future, and across the hemisphere.
As supernatural as we sometimes feel, humans are part
of the earth’s cycles. We depend on the photosynthesis of plants
for all food and on plant respiration for oxygen. Like all animals,
our eliminations and ultimately our bodies return to the earth to
be recycled into nutrients for future life. Being human, though,
and members of an industrial society, we consider ourselves
more highly sanctioned or evolved than our earthmates. We
reward ourselves by extracting proportionately astronomical
amounts of energy from the cycle. We consume about 100
times more energy than our bodies would need were we in
a nonindustrial society, hand making our existence. We use
it to pave roads, build and drive cars, be entertained, heat big
houses, manufacture and transport goods, advertise these
goods, and so on. Many of our wastes and byproducts cannot
beneficially return to the cycle. Thus we break the continually
recycling and globally limited energy cycle, passing the bill for
our excess to neighbors both human and nonhuman, and to
their descendants.
Costs, and the consequences of ignoring them, are
disguised by the cosmopolitan nature of the system. Distance
and intermediaries between resources, consumers and refuse
sites help to cloak costs of consuming and discarding these
resources. For example, our trash disappears into the garbage
truck and we think no more of it. We don't watch it fill the
countryside. We don’t see the streams of agricultural runoff
or the eroded land behind our cheap, cosmetically perfect
food.We don’t see the poverty and dependence that result from
forcing cultural upheavals in foreign lands in the name of invest
ment. These damages cannot be repaired by stuffing money
in the wounds and do not disappear when ignored. Admittedly,
ignorance is simpler, guilt-free and requires no sacrifice, but
ignorance is not a solution.
Industrial corporate capitalism damages the health
and integrity of our human environment and relationships by
overhauling personal wealth. In our capital culture, money is a
basic survival tool. It buys shelter, food and clothing. We have
been led by advertising and culture to believe that money
also buys abstracts like security, happiness, love, reputation
and health. As a result of this belief individuals compete for
purchasing power, taking attention from the family and human
community. Ironically, these neglected human relationships
provide the happiness, love, security and personal significance
we're trying to buy. When we value money as a leverage to
success we also sacrifice our natural communities. These are
the very relationships we depend on for health, food, resources,
recreation and solace. In this way our culture undermines its
own existence.
The pursuit of unlimited growth on a finite planet
leads to an obvious dead end. It encourages greed. It estranges
neighbors. It enables us to rationalize the shaving back of social,
environmental, aesthetic and moral values. Its waste contamin
ates our air, water and food. It sacrifices the wholeness of our
own habitat for a profit. We fool ourselves if we believe that
growth is progress or that value can be counted in dollars, yens
and marks.
This consumption-based pursuit of profit is unsustain
able at its current rate, yet my job is to increase profit. After all,
I am working for some of that money.
We don’t often think of these perspectives. Our luxuries
and excesses are routine. Electricity, extensive water-based
sewage systems, cable TV, cell-phones, microwaves, refriger
ators, and automobiles are considered rights in America, not
the luxuries they are. My job is to convince people that noodle
makers, bubble pens, matching dinnerware, whriligigs and slug
poison are also essentials. Thus, my lower-end retail job furthers
industrial corporate capitalism's manipulation of humans and
destruction of human habitat by enabling, even encouraging
people to buy goods they do not need at prices which don’t
cover the whole cost — which are essentially loans against
our future and thefts against our neighbors. Simply by doing
my retail job well, I feed an industrial machine that is eating
the ground out from under our feet.
I have thought about the ironies of what we call progress
and the blindness of measuring value in money. I have also
considered the cost of the lifestyle I sell every day. Instead of
pushing another plastic token to modern technology, I would
like to challenge its assumptions. I would like to question our
definitions and priorities. Most of all, I would like to live in a
manner consistent with what I perceive as true, and I understand
my employment with this company to be in direct conflict with
my personal goals. Thank you for an enlightening opportunity.
Ginni Callahan wrote this article as a letter to a former
boss, a large local retailer. “The job grew increasingly frustrating
the more I thought about what I was doing,” she wrote. “I even
tually quit but lacked the guts to tell my boss and coworkers the
whole reason why. They would have thought me bonkers. Dear
Boss is a belated letter of resignation "
CREA TE A DECLARA T/ON OF EQUALITY
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