Coming to terms with capitalism

Slow, relatively uninteresting days, completely by myself. My phone cut off for a full – gasp – 24 hours – requiring what equates to just over a dollar for each hour to reinstate it (ouch!) – and my internet connection repeatedly “unavailable,” it’s no wonder that I spoke so openly with Black Male Bill sitting across from me at the Barnes and Noble coffee shop/magazine section. Noting that I was jotting down the website address for an MS program for Public Policy and Human Development in the Netherlands, he asks me if I’m applying to grad school, and I, peering at his selection of books on essay writing and career change ask him the same thing. What ensues is a solid lesson in making choices, one that I am finally ready to hear, as my silver spoon is coming up dry and empty and I have to learn to survive. I blatantly take notes from our conversation – questions such as “Do I embrace the capitalist model?” arise from the confrontation of our differing perspectives.

I don’t name him Black Male Bill in jest, only he was very forthright in highlighting his identity as such as a major hindrance to the achievement of his goals in life. I wonder how overt the racism has been as his computer programming workplace, or if it has just been the gradual accretion of dismissive remarks and lack of promotions that has characterized his experience. Of course I would not know what this is like, but he is sympathetic in hearing me state frankly that, “No, but, I am a woman,” which presents itself with its own societal and biological pressures and limitations. Ultimately, I am Melinda Lee, and that is probably the worst demon of all that I have to deal with. Maybe Bill for Bill also, though you wouldn’t know it. He is expressionless and speaks in a calm monotone his articulate explications on “judicious decision”-making. Whether he takes aspirin for a headache and whether he should marry his current girlfriend are decisions similarly made – “judiciously,” with thought to the amount of risk involved (the pill makes me drowsy and I have to drive in an hour = no), added to a touch of intuition (we get along really well = yes). I used to find such a process unfathomable, incomprehensible, maybe even inhuman and uncompassionate, but that’s only because I didn’t have to go through it myself. I have not really made any concrete decisions for myself in life, or set myself parameters or goals to achieve and then move on from. I can’t commit because I’m laden with carrying around the past and the unfinished – a single person surrounded by STUFF, unwilling to relinquish any of it because in every bit of material possession there is an affirmation of those memories, experiences, and potentials in me. Unwilling to take on any more STUFF because, firstly, it would further complicate the absence of organization with Existing Stuff, and secondly, because it would consume valuable excess storage for Better Stuff that may or may not come in the near future. Sitting at the buffet table of life, Melinda Lee wants it all and therefore, none of it.

I always thought capitalism was the root cause of most all evil in life, resentful that it was my benefactor yet the thief of my father from daily life and of my family from national significance. Then I blamed, in turn, the West, colonialism, our English language, and our Christian legacy (I am the fourth-generation). I blamed my mother when my father turned out to be all right human being who said “sorry,” and she became the embodiment of all things wrong about domesticated womanhood. I eked out from her confessions of her dramatic past in order to “heal” it but in so doing also assumed a position of superiority and intimacy despite a gaping 35 year difference that maybe we were both wrong to accept. I blamed the trauma of displacement in adolescence for falling in love with the wrong men, I blamed class and cultural difference for break-ups, and I blamed heartbreak for not knowing what I wanted in school. And often, I would come back to hating my privilege. “Why couldn’t I have been born to a working class family?,” I would hear myself think. “Through the struggle of survival, we may have had stronger family values, and I would have learned how to toughen up and work harder.” What a ridiculous romanticism. Along with wanting to “play baseball in the yard with my dad,” had I, of course, been a boy, such internal voices I am now going to blame on the infiltration of Western mass media into my childhood. In terms of resenting the money I come from, now that I’ve graduated from an elite and expensive college I realize that everybody wants what it was that I got. Well, hell. Couldn’t somebody have told me this earlier?!?!?!?!

So now, there’s no one left to blame. Any shame I may feel in having been spoilt and lazy only incapacitates me further, so I am taking the time out from all expectation to give myself reason to make myself proud of me. And let’s get real and grow up – not only did my foreparents work long and hard to provide for us, but also we were not, despite the cultural confusion, raised in America – there are very distinct class barriers that exist in a more traditional, less “developed” society that Singapore is not exempt from. That I inherit a legacy of progressive thinkers – insofar as aspiring for something better is progressive – is something I should be proud of.

So priorities, high, medium, low, and percentages of effort spent in them. Checkboxes.