I am writing today to protest many of the serially inflicted injustices that occur in the world today as a regular part of doing business as usual. These happen every day to regular people as a result of our phone service, retailing, insurance, credit companies, and especially government. There seems to be a nebulous force that exists that causes many of these injustices. To some he is known as “the powers that be,” “Big Brother,” or described with the overly general terms greed and bureaucracy. As for me, I shall call this phenomenon The Man.
The Man is very hard to identify. He doesn’t have a name, birthday, address, contact information, or any discernible identity. For all practical or legal purposes, he does not even exist. This is very advantageous for his modus operandi. In plural form he is often referred to as the collective They. They, of course, is the ambiguous group that arbitrarily assigns truth and authority in all matters. They tell us what clothes are in style and that trans fat (whatever that is) is bad. We as the mere proletariat of society must therefore accept whatever is suggested by Them, or more specifically, The Man, simply because we don’t individually have the means to do otherwise and the sheer inertia of our laziness as consumers and citizens prohibits us from doing anything collectively.
The Man has been sticking it to us for eons. What I am calling for is a turning of the tables. It is time to stick it to The Man. But, how, one might ask, do we stick it to The Man? Well, the answer to that question can be just as elusive as The Man himself is. Maybe the best way to understand how to stick it to him is to understand how he works and in what environments he thrives. Following are a few sketches to illustrate.
