Boycotting Ignorance

Original description:

A response to all the people who keep saying a boycott of BP is a waste of time or that it will prevent them from compensating the victims of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Leak. NOTE: THE AUDIO IS NOT SAFE FOR WORK. YOU’VE BEEN WARNED. Seven Dirty Words definitely get used, and then some. [Edited to add: BEFORE you tell me that all a boycott is going to do is hurt the “mom & pop” stores and “little people,” please check out the blog post for this video at http://www.lowgenius.net/post/2010/06… ]

This is particularly fun because we get to have video and writing archives. This may also be a good place to point out how some folks try to source the idea that “all I post is snarky tweets” and so forth. I spend a lot of time on social media, reading news, watching and reading how people are reacting, watching how comment sections are directed and misdirected either deliberately or out of sheer force of ignorance, and those activities often inspire content or help me provide a relatable real-world frame for what I ultimately hope is good storytelling in service if driving home greater truths.

I know, the idea of speaking in parables and metaphors to make important points is pretty dumb, I don’t know what hippie came up with that crap. Surely nobody would take it seriously. Anyway.

Originally recorded June 21, 2010 in Benton Harbor, MI in NTSC-HD/VHS-C. Trivia note: this is not the leather duster I have had since around 2012; if you look carefully this one’s WAY too small, but the effects and lighting and camera position help hide that so I don’t look like a goof. Well, more than usual anyway.

In a weird bit of synchronicity, I discuss the value of the music business, which is a subject I ended up learning a great deal more about, years later, when I worked for Musician’s Friend. The number mentioned in this article doesn’t include instrument sales and a few other categories, some of which barely existed at the time if at all. The general point is still valid and stands, however.

Below is the full text of the original post referenced in the description above.

Oh, PPS: I legit haven’t spent one dime at a BP gas station since before this was filmed.

Another one inspired by some idiot talking smack online and not knowing what the hell they’re talking about.  PLEASE pay attention to the disclaimer:  this video is by far the most aggressive and profanity-laden diatribe I’ve recorded thus far, and I’m absolutely certain it’s going to offend some people.

I posted this video to YouTube several hours before I am now writing this blog entry.  In that time it’s been picked up and shared, and one of the very common responses I’m seeing is best illustrated by this polite, well-thought-out, and well-written comment, which I am leaving unattributed to avoid any inadvertent appearance of attacking or criticizing any person in my follow – up comments, which will comprise the bulk of this blog entry.

I understand your outrage, but please remember that the ones who will suffer from a boycott will be the mom and pop owners of the franchise gas stations selling their products. Most of them have contracts with BP and cannot stop selling the product, even if they want to. I’m sickened by this whole thing, but I hate to see hard working people pay for what the corporation did. It’s a tough situation.

There is nothing in the above response that I find objectionable, or disagreeable, or bad, or evil.  It’s obviously well-meant, self-less, and full of love for one’s fellow man.

Unfortunately, it’s also a stark example of the sort of thinking that’s going to drive us to extinction in a big hurry if we don’t fix our thinking, NOW.

“But JH,” you say, “How can you BE so heartless?!  How can you be so selfish and self-serving as to just throw Mom & Pop, those stalwarts of American Entrepreneurial Spirit, under a big oily bus like that?”

Well, you know, I don’t like it any more than you.  And I’m not throwing anyone under a bus…I’m trying to end the practice of allowing them to throw themselves, and you and me along with them.

In spite of the aggression volume of the video here, I don’t mean that in any bad sense.  I’m not accusing Mom and Pop of being genocidal greedy corporate bastards raping the planet for their own selfish gain.  They’re just trying to make a buck the best they can, just like all of us.

But.

Well, I’ll let my original response, as written, speak the rest of my thoughts on the matter.

Hi.  I’m the guy who made the video.  Please indulge me for a few minutes, if you will, and let me see if I can explain this in terms that sound less like I’m about ready to hang Mom & Pop from the nearest yardarm with extreme prejudice.

I don’t want to see working people pay for what the corporation did, either.

I also don’t want to see us continue to be dependent on petrochemicals for every aspect of our daily lives from transportation to information to packaging to hygiene, because that dependency is killing us.

The reality is this:

The “working people,” including Mom & Pop, have paid.  And paid.  And paid.  And paid.  You’re paying right now, and so am I, and that’s nothing about the ongoing crisis – it’s just the side-effects of petroleum dependency.  Air pollution, water pollution, groundwater contamination, we all know the drill.

What we’ve lost sight of is that the working people – including each one of us, including most explicitly yours truly – have allowed ourselves to be talked into remaining dependent on petroleum and its by-products…because it’s easier than taking the hit. 

It’s easier than finding another way to do things. 

An illustration, if I may…and again I know this is long and I apologize but I think it bears the time and effort to try to explain properly.

I don’t know if this exists in other countries, but here in the US, there is this concept of the “rent-to-own” store where the baseline or poor person or family will go to a store and rather than paying a set, one-time price for a given item, they’ll pay a weekly fee for a set term, say a year.

When you do the math on these places, it’s really a boneheaded, terrible thing.  A computer that might cost $800 at the local big-box store will cost you $40 at a rent-to-own…$40 PER WEEK, for 52 weeks.

That’s about $2000.  For a computer that you could have paid less than half that for.  It’s a mortgage or a car loan stuffed into a _reducto ad absurdum_ argument that for once *isn’t* a logical fallacy.

Stupid, right?  But it’s hugely successful and profitable.  All it requires is a complete lack of ethics on the part of the business owner, and a sense of desperation on the part of the buyer.

It’s preying on the poor and the needy, and the poor and the needy are complicit…because hey, you GOTTA have a new TV, right?  Keeping up with the Joneses and all that.  Or even furniture.  You GOTTA have furniture.  Of course, you could go three weeks without the furniture, save up, and pay maybe $1000 and get the furniture new at retail…

…or you can pay ONLY $50 RIGHT NOW…

…and every week for the next two years.  Which of course adds up to FIVE thousand dollars rather than the thousand you would have paid if you’d taken the comfort hit for a few weeks and sat on boxes while saving up your money and eventually (far sooner than two years, I might add) buying it retail.  But then you gotta sit on boxes for a few weeks, or do without television, or what have you.

(Note:  The math NEVER, EVER comes close to even being sane in these places, it’s ALWAYS a 100% markup on the base price PLUS like 150% interest).

We’ve been doing the same thing with petroleum for DECADES.  We could have been running biofuels made from hemp fifty years ago or more…but it costs more than petroleum.

Now this is important:

It’s always GOING to cost more than petroleum.  The petroleum companies (and they’re not the only ones, but they’ve certainly done their part as have tobacco companies and cotton companies and so forth) have worked hard to build an image of hemp and cannabis as a “dangerous” thing, a technique that’s proven particularly effective in the US, but it works well enough anywhere.  Make people afraid of alternatives to your product; use political power gained by financial success to rig the laws such that alternatives are cost-prohibitive.  Then argue to the general public that the costs of alternatives are too high, and voila:  the purest definition of ‘captive audience.’

Pretty soon, you’ll have the audience fighting each other to buy bigger and less fuel-efficient vehicles than they would ever possibly NEED for any reason, simply because they’re status symbols.

And then the oil guys are happy little yachtsmen, and the silly little consumers – that’s you AND ME, I don’t mean in any way to condescend or suggest that I’m any less guilty than any one of you or anyone else – enjoy the smug self-satisfaction of exercising their “right” to kill the rest of us with 8-mile-per-gallon social status symbols.

At some point, we’re ALL going to have to agree to take the hit.  Sorry, mom and pop, but you’re gonna have to find a different primary attractant (fuel is NEVER a profit center for gas stations, and outside of states where pricing below cost is prohibited by law it’s often a deliberate loss compensated for by the other things that fuel customers purchase).  Sorry, Mom and Pop, you’re gonna have to change your business model or get out of business, because we can no longer avoid the stark reality:

Our sympathy for mom and pop, and the commercial inertia that goes with it, is killing us. 

It’s no longer killing us invisibly and slowly; it’s killing us graphically and quickly.  I still don’t think we really understand just how BIG this mess is, and frankly I think we’re being encouraged to NOT understand it…because I think if we really did understand it, some of us would panic and then a REAL mess would start.

Fine, we don’t need rioting in the streets.  But we also don’t need to continue to complacently accept the “fact” of oil dependence…because it’s only a fact to the extent that we have allowed it to become a fact, and we are allowing it to remain one every time we say “a boycott won’t work, what about the little guy, what about mom and pop?”

This is one of the very few times in human history we can legitimately be said to be consciously standing on the edge of a change in paradigm.

I say this without the least bit of condescension or condemnation, and with every full understanding that I have just as much burden of guilt as anybody and probably more than many:

Isn’t this really our golden opportunity to take charge of our destiny as a species and finally, for once, make a conscious decision to do the more difficult thing because it’s also the RIGHT thing?

We CAN reject oil, but it will require courage, and sacrifice, and the rejection of many realities that we have long accepted as immutable but which are really only inconvenient to change.

Yes, I’m sorry for mom and pop and all the clerks and pump jockeys, but you know…I just bet if we put mom and pop into , mom and pop could make just as fine a living selling alternate fuels.  I bet mom and pop could make a GREAT living selling food to people who commute 20 or 30 miles to work in a human-powered, enclosed, personal vehicle.  There are thousands of ideas out there that fit the bill.  There are other ways to do this, if we want to find them.

Maybe it’s time mom and pop got to work on solving THAT problem, instead of solving only the ultimately selfish problem of how to keep THEMSELVES taken care of in the manner they prefer, without regard to the effect they’re having on the rest of us.  I hate to say it, but “mom and pop” have smiled benignly and patted us on the back and pandered to our noble concern right up to the point where it’s about to wipe our asses right off the planet.

I love my mom and pop…but I love my granddaughter too, and I’d like to think that this planet’s going to continue supporting human life long enough for her to love HER granddaughter.

Thanks for your time, and please remember to share this as widely as possible.  There’s still time for us to “get it.”

from archived original at https://web.archive.org/web/20100717012219/http://www.lowgenius.net/post/2010/06/21/Boycotting-Ignorance.aspx