Wednesday, November 24, 2021

TURNKEY


I watched this TED talk in our feminist studies class, and I'm telling you, I'm not giving birth unless and until my partner legitimately pays me to do so, along with when I do the household chores and whatever else. I also am a big proponent of adoption, anyway, so perhaps I will never give birth in my life. I'm not sure, it's too early to tell. I am only 31, and in my first year of college. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

My head has been wrapped up around billionaires and the redistribution of wealth for the past week. It may be because a lot of what I study invariably revolves around giving back and ensuring justice for marginalised communities. It might be because I've been veering toward such issues for the past couple of years. It might be the latter leading up to the former, and now I have a constant headache because the lack of light makes it really hard for me to stay up when I'm supposed to stay up, compounded by the fact that my brain never, never, never stops working, and sometimes my eyes glaze over when you're talking to me, because I'm thinking about something else, which is rude, and I'm sorry. I try very hard to be present and attentive, but I don't succeed at everything I do.

Joey says billionaires are like toddlers, because toddlers get what they ask for, and they don't take no for an answer. Actually, Joey spoke of specifically one billionaire, who is Elon Musk. It's interesting to have a tenuous connection to Elon Musk like this, it's a name I say often, and most people know who he is and have said his name. My school counsellor (I go to one because I thought I had adult ADHD but I haven't seen a nurse to get diagnosed, and I like just speaking to counsellors and getting therapy, anyway) said Elon Musk made a dick move, with the world hunger thing, and then I spoke to my favorite professor, my love and light, Kaia, and then she said Elon Musk is a dick, so basically Elon and dick get said in the same sentence pretty frequently.

It is strange to think of him as a person, through the eyes of someone who's worked with him and gone into the same building as he has for pretty much eight years (I think). I told Joey, when I was in LA in 2016, I'd asked him whether he thought Elon deserved what he had, and Joey had said Elon works hard. So this time, to hear him being slightly more critical of Elon, I said I was proud of him, but then Joey said, again, "he does work hard, he just refuses to take no for an answer."

There is a.... mismatch of worldviews here. As a person, perhaps the man Elon Musk works hard, yes, perhaps he stays long hours at SpaceX and Tesla and doesn't go off gallivanting on Saint-Tropez (although, does he? I do not know). Then there is the rest of the world, the proletariat who hold the factual view that you physically cannot and do not earn billions of dollars through sheer hard work, and he did not. People are working for him, and other people are creating his wealth, and people contributed to his wealth, long before he started working, so it is not only due to him that he's a billionaire.

And there's the issue of world hunger at stake. If you had not encountered it for some reason, Elon Musk offered money to help with world hunger if someone could come up with a provable viable solution. Then, someone from the UN came up with a plan! It remains to be seen whether he'll actually do it. 

The fact of the matter, though, is why did he offer in the first place? What was the point? What was he trying to do? The entire thing just screams dick move. Is he an actual toddler? Are there behavioural experts who have studied toddlers and can explain how we can get a toddler to cooperate if the toddler knew that they could alleviate the hunger of a portion of the world population?  

My head is aching all the time. I can go to school, day in and day out, talk about taxing the rich, or eating them, all the time, and then I can go home, shoot the breeze with Joey, but nothing is going to change, and the plight of the world weighs heavy, on the world. Sometimes I am paralysed from the lack of change. The system is going to have to be reformed, or we will be going through a revolution. So I sit at home, have my dinner, and think about why people are the way they are, and how we can coax them to think about other people.