The Absurd Banality of "Opportunity" In America
What is this word, this phrase?
I hear it often, “if only I’d been given the opportunity.” Maybe not this phrase entirely, but something like it. “Opportunity,” the opportunity for what?
To work a job? To keep busy in a corner office? A cubicle cell?
The word, “opportunity” becomes ever more insulting as each day passes into the next. Oftentimes, I go on Handshake (joinhandshake.com) and see that some bank is offering the opportunity for me to get on a virtual call and beg them for employment. Beg them to work as an intern for $20 an hour. Beg them to be insulted, belittled, and harassed in an office. What kind of “opportunity” is this?
At this point in my life, it’s less about getting a job, and more about keeping some sort of equilibrium with the people in the office. Ever since I left the military, people have become more and more unstable. When I was at Andrews AFB (as a contractor), one of the government people there actually had the audacity to threaten me. He was envious, sure, a rather unreasonable man, true as well, but sustained hostility? This was simply too much to bear. I will not go on a tirade about my displeasure with the people of Washington D.C., they are maurauders as I’ve said many times before. American Huns, ill tempered, desperate, aggressive, and on and on… I need air in my lungs for this. I won’t spend it crying and whining this time around.
Opportunity in the American sense is the opportunity to beg a merchant for a job, get beaten on and belittled in the office, drive home in a state of mental anguish, then return for the pleasure of taking the whipping again and again, day after day, until death. This is the American Dream, work for money printed from nothing, have it devalued against your will, then be thankful that your 401K is finally worth 40% of what it was when you initially started saving. It is the American Scam, a mechanism of exploitation with the threat of a bullet to the head if one chooses to resist. Non-participation in the ritual of extraction results in homelessness, or worse. Rejection of the methods of extraction results in more extraction. Avoidance of the mechanism of extraction results in a chasing, jailing, and further extraction.
Oh yes, yes! This is the opportunity I was waiting for. Born to toil, born to rest my eyes upon useless Excel spreadsheets in the cubicle of my choosing. The J.P. Morgan cubicle, or perhaps the Wells Fargo one (been there), or better still, government?
Well, government is no longer a safe haven for those unwilling to take too hard a beating. The oligarchs have found them out. They’ve furloghed them, and are threatening more firings. Yes, they will learn their lesson, they will be punished for whatever it is that they did… What was it that they did exactly?
Well, they had the audacity to seek shelter in an ever present economic storm. A storm that never stops, uncertainty that ceases to end. The merchants shall have their pound of flesh, even if they have two-thousand pounds of flesh already. For their greed is insatiable, their hunger to destroy, while appearing helpful and conscientious. What is it that they truly want? What might actually satiate the hungry shareholder, the despotic investor?
More.
Hello! We’re D.J. Hoskins
We are Davena and Jason Hoskins, co-authors of 40+ books and siblings who write under the pseudonym D.J. Hoskins. Three years apart and in our twenties, we have been fascinated by stories from a young age. Davena is a student attending Princeton University, and Jason attends Georgetown University.
