Corporatizing Mediocrity

My recent exit from my full-time job has gotten me thinking about the way corporations seem to be handling their bottom lines. I left the company because after a year of promises of pay raises never realized, always footnoted with 'after the new management takes hold, after we reach the numbers, after the start of the fiscal year', yadda yadda yadda, I lost my patience and my ability to suspend my corporate disbelief in the constanly moving focus of the company ideals. So while it was a good job for what it was, it was time to leave.

I have a friend who works as an editor of a newspaper. She too is fighting the stress of the big squeeze from new owners, new management that only wants more from the existing employee base, unwilling to pay higher for higher quality, unwilling to pay to keep those more experienced employees in their jobs, and in the end winding up with an employee base that consists of only the inexperienced, and the burnt-out.

She too is looking for new work.

Another friend was shopping for a pastry cutter from the local Target. For those of you unfamilar with what a pastry cutter is, it's a tined device that lets you cut butter or shortening into flour much more efficiently than the two-knives-together method my grandmother taught me. Now, I know that not too many people make their own pastries anymore, but really, should it be so difficult to find this 5 dollar device? When she asked the store help if they had it, she was told no, that college students don't make pies.

So what I'm getting to is this: how long will we settle for average? How long do we dumb down to the lowest common denominator so that the big-business corporations can shave millions of partial pennies into their big profit bank accounts?

Sometimes I make myself just a little bit sick when I realize i'm settling for less than what I like, either by watching a tv program i don't really care for that much, but don't have the energy to turn off, or listening to that commercial i can't stand but am managing to tune out of my active conciousness, or order that food that doesn't really speak to what I'm hungry for, but is there, and is cheap. Life has a way of keeping us busy and distracted from the hidden paths, the circuitous routes that so often take us to places that offer so much more return on our energy investment. Getting older has a way of wearing down, wearing smooth the passions that lit our activity when we were coming out of high school and thought that going vegetarian, or boycotting particular companies, would really make a difference. I think I gave up my "Fur is dead" t-shirt for a little extra closet space. Maybe that makes me cynical, maybe it makes me a hypocrite. But today, I can start paying a little more attention to what I buy, and buy a little less crap. Because, after all, we only have today.