Choices

Whether you live alone or have a family, if push comes to shove, is there really any choice, when it comes to either paying your rent/mortgage, or putting food on the table?  When an animal is hungry, it has to find food and, in turn, when thirsty, it has to find water.  Rent? Credit card payment? Not an option if you’re hungry or thirsty.  You can multiply that exponentially, if it’s a matter of feeding your children.  How do things end up like this?

The pandemic has brought to light the ever-increasing problems of our fast-paced, consumer-based society.  So many live on the edge, just making ends meet at the end of the month and, under normal circumstances, people are OK with that; bills paid, got to eat out once or twice, able to put gas in the car.  But if there’s a glitch…  People in Naples, for example, live under the shadow of Vesuvius, yet nobody is really too worried about the day it might blow again – and rightly so, life is for living!  In the last couple of years, people have lost their jobs, others managed to keep their jobs, but were kept from working for long periods.  There was government aid, but that was just a band-aid solution.  The money ends, the bills continue to arrive.  Nobody cares if, all of a sudden, you can´t afford your lifestyle, you still owe and you still have to pay.  Inflation, a number people could afford to ignore over the last many years, is now, again, an issue.  Oil producers were worried that the price of crude was too low, so they cut production.  The result?  Much higher fuel costs for all, which, as we all know, affects the price of every service we enjoy and every product we buy.  Shipping has suffered a huge blow due to the pandemic.  The price of shipping has rocketed to levels never-imagined , with no end in sight, (A 40 foot container shipping from Portugal to Canada that cost 4400 US dollar back in May of 2021, was 10000 by October).  In the end, the consumer ends up paying all these extra costs because companies are not about to tell their shareholders that profits are going to be reduced, (or stay the same, because if there’s no growth, then there’s a problem) due to concerns over the rest of us being burdened by extra costs.  

Oil companies and banks are “recovering”, making their billions in profits once again, yet now, many considered middle class are resorting to food banks in order to stay afloat.  Choices?  People are still climbing all over each other to buy houses or rent apartments at ridiculously inflated prices mostly because they have no choice whatsoever.  The “market” dictates it.  What the heck is the “market” anyway? A Deity that must be obeyed at all cost? Can something not be done to correct a system that adversely affects such a huge swath of the population?  Why does it have to be that the more people need something, the more it costs?  Why is it that services and goods which humans require to survive, are not controlled, so that everyone can have access to them?

 The middle class has been blinded by the dream of making it up the proverbial ladder to the level where the “other half”, (in reality it´s nothing close to half), resides, but the current situation shows us all that there’s no room there for the rest of us.  They need the rest of us where we are, in order to be able to remain where they are – and that’s fine.  In reality, we have the capability to make life down below as good as can be. So, maybe concentrate less on what that section of the population has and focus on the current disparities that create difficulties for most people.

What if those who dictate policy came more from the ranks of the ones who suffer all the consequences of said policies? Then things might not be so out of control.

Fiquem bem.

Raul Freitas/MS