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« Tools & Future Plans | Main | Street 2 »
Saturday
Jun122010

Labor

Greetings,

Welcome to another edition of: how to paint a curb in Cambodia.

Part 1. Get a plastic bucket. Throw in white language. Tie a blue and white checkered scarf around your neck. It's hotter than the mid-day sun on the Tropic of Cancer. South of the Equator. Slather it on with a broom. David Foster Wallace wrote: The Broom of The System.

DFW said: "what it feels like to live, to observe, to experience in absurd detail where others lack the self-scrutiny or courage to voice them."

2. Your four emaciated brothers walk past on their way to work. Three carry shovels. One carries a sledgehammer. They will transform the small sleepy river town into: (a) a hot tourist location (b) frozen ice inside the hard cold fact:  how necessities become luxuries which happens around Earth. Consider ice. Frozen water. Necessity. Yesterday it was water. Today it is white rice. Close as white on rice. Tomorrow it's Medicine. The day after tomorrow in the long now it's Education. Life's little luxuries. Plural.

They suck on life's plastic straw. They discard the plastic straw and cup on the ground. They walk. They paint. They shovel. They slam sledgehammers.

Their daily efforts will revitalize world economies. They will speak at G-20 economic forums. They will address important powerful people. They will speak to 5% of the world's richest people who control 98% of the total wealth.

They will have a voice. They will represent millions of peasants and poor people. Their labor will wear them down. They will lose the resolve, the focus the vision to alter history. They will be replaced by new workers.

They paint. They shovel dirt. They pound sledgehammers. They suck ice. They mill around. They watch the world pass by hearing inadequate impossible language. Their DAILY language is pure, raw labor. 

A Cambodian woman carries the world on her back. 

Metta.

  

 

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