Having no say is slavery, too
Recently Owen Holmes wrote about slavery — the legality, the justification, the servitude, etc. According to Mr. Holmes, “slave labour is still in use in North America” — agree! A retired fixedincome person whose utilities, food and cost of their simple existence exceeds or equals their income — is a slave.
A while ago Lethbridge civic administration signed on to spend a small fortune discussing a recycling program, consulting “experts” as far away as Largo, Florida and Superior, Colorado. Thrown in occasionally was the community they pretend to serve. After the sandwiches were down the drain and the champagne corks were helping heat the “precious landfill,” they proceeded the opposite of what was expressed by the vast majority who loudly pelted administration with what they did and didn’t want. Forced slavery supports this example of wasteful, undemocratic governance.
Another example: When a project to widen and pave a short section of a roadway (University Drive) takes two years to complete, and the make-work centre downtown decides to pour hundreds of thousands of your tax-derived monies into a massive, useless and unnecessary concrete dividing island containing hundreds of trees, shrubs and plants (mostly all which will die from heat in the summer or salt piled on them in the winter), there’s slavery involved. That slavery is in the form of those who will endlessly pay to maintain the stressed, decaying and dying plants, trees and shrubs.
All we needed was a wider road to service the community! We’re slaves to this waste by virtue of the fact those who pay for it more often than not have absolutely zero say in the waste. Rinse those soup cans — capture all the cardboard — but ignore the monetary and environmental cost of hundreds upon hundreds of yards of concrete, industries pulling it all together and the dead trees and plants! How dumb!
One need not be in prison to experience slavery. The morally void among us see to that! There are moments one has difficulty distinguishing the bars on the horizon from the bars on the door.
Alvin W. Shier
Lethbridge