Corporations

I had the opportunity to spend a few hours with my older brother on Sunday and had a wonderful time chatting with him. We talked about many interesting things and I'd love to write about all of it but won't. One thing we talked about is the impact of corporations on our everyday lives.

I have thought many times over the last few years about how strange it is that most of society gets up and goes to a job for some company or organization. As recently as 200-250 years ago, most people's jobs were at home. There were a lot of farmers. In fact, for quite some time most of society was farmers.

Once you had a place to live, you just worked hard for the food you needed to stay alive and you did it at home. Every day was a take-your-child-to-work day. Even many grist mills were run on people's properties so they could meet the community needs but they were close to home to do it. As our country got going, there were men that did go to work for a variety of things. Our own government emerged and people became government leaders. Men were needed away from home to build roads and bridges. With conflicts arising, men were needed for military service. During this time, my brother and I discussed building a home. People built their own homes. They didn't need any kind of permits to build it and they hadn't been formally trained to do so but everybody was on a timeline. Get your home built before the weather gets too cold or you die. That was really the only home-building rule people had to follow and no man enforced it, only nature.

We skipped ahead to now and corporations run everything in society and so many little parts of our lives. First of all, most people work for a business or organization of some kind. The company sets many rules for employees, including how your daily schedule will be run and how much prosperity you'll be allowed. We have evolved into a society that manages very little of our own money. We use a banking corporation to hold all of our paychecks and savings. We tell them to pay our bills to others and rely on them to do so according to our instructions.

We go to businesses to meet most, if not all, of our grocery needs. For the most part, society relies on corporations to advise us on health issues and to guide us through the process of maintaining or improving our health. How do we know what we should be doing about our health? Corporations tell us things like get a physical every year, go to the doctor for certain symptoms, get certain screenings done at certain ages, etc. It doesn't even take much digging to realize the government is being run by corporations. They sponsor everything and get paid by us to do it. The environment is heavily impacted by corporations. We are expected to behave certain ways to protect the environment: "don't use aerosal cans anymore", "buy organic food because it limits the chemicals we're exposed to", etc. Yet when companies like Dupont dump chemicals into the environment and animals start dying and people are getting sick and Dupont intentionally hides information from the Environmental Protection Agency but is STILL never held accountable for the devastion they cause in the environment, we see the power a corporation has that an individual does not.

Our conversation kind of went on but my brother looked around and saw a card I'd made him and said that was a break from the power of corporations and that it had been a way to use creativity without corporate influence. I agreed to some extent but then said, "But I bought that paper from a craft store that belongs to a corporation and they bought the paper from a paper manufacturer. I may have chosen how to use the paper but at least two corporations were involved before I even started using it." He brainstormed a bit more and said that one day he was outside and saw a beautiful flower in the yard so he cut it and brought it in and gave it to his wife and that was not influenced by a corporation. That was all nature. However, he then said the plant had to come from somewhere and chances are, it was at one time purchased from a corporation because this is all located in a highly developed city. It was just interesting to really sit and think about the ways corporations have leaked into every aspect of our lives within a few hundred years. There are some sites that give ideas about how to avoid corporate influence to the extent that we can.

Some ideas are just beautiful. Instead of consuming the entertainment that's readily available in a variety of platforms, make our own entertainment. Create our own works of art. Learn to fix things and not just replace everything that breaks. There are plenty more ideas to explore. This is just something I like to think about from time to time to at least consider.