Oh, the things I would do if I didn't have to spend most of my time either going to work, at work, or recovering from work and had more money than just enough to get by! Don't get me wrong, the benefits of living on a $30,000/year income under American capitalism do not escape me, it's just that they are tremendously outweighed by all of the disadvantages: the amount of time I spend doing something I hate, the nagging fear that at any moment my life could totally collapse, the nagging fear that when I am old and incapacitated I will be lying in my shit for hours, my only real wish being that somebody come by and put a pillow between my knees. Not to mention the systemic problems with capitalism: overproduction of waste, stress-related illness, environmental destruction, alienation, the emphasis on the more primitive aspects of our human nature, the destruction of community, income inequality, etc.
I am trying to escape from it, of course, and I have several long-term plans in the works to slowly extricate myself from the traps of mainstream American culture. This is tricky business, since my skin has grown around the straps and I must be careful not to injure myself in the process. More on this later. For now, I wish to fantasize on what I would do if I had a few extra million lying around or if I weren't so painfully shy that I could actually behave like a capitalist and raise the money.
First, I would save the elephants. I have an affinity for all living things and even defend the most hideous life-forms of all such as leeches, infectious organisms, mosquitoes, coakroaches, and humans, but I have a special relationship with the elephant that goes back several months when I was at the St. Louis Zoo for the first time since the whole concept of a zoo disturbs me on some level even though I know all about the great things they do. I think the feeling could be described as love at first sight when one of the adult elephants that was so far off in the distance that I could've squashed its head between my thumb and index finger, suddenly began to charge towards the crowd in a sort of slow, graceful trot with it's ears billowing in the wind. The beauty took my breath away.
"You're crying!" my boyfriend said incredulously as the elephant, who was now right in front of us, raised his trunk up majestically infront of his innocuous face, his incomprehensible size rendering the ballet even more sublime. "Yes," I thought to myself, "I'm in love with this elephant."
I think my boyfriend was a little jealous.
"I am not a man!" the elephant appeared to be yelling, who is arbitrarily a male in this story simply to avoid using the term "it", "I am an animal!"
So, most of my money and time would go to help elephants and all other similarly threatened living things on our planet. Of course, any effort to alleviate human poverty, ignorance, greed, poor resource utilization and all of the other scurges of our species that either directly or indirectly lead to the destruction of our life-support system would also get my attention.
After that, if I had just a little money left over, I would promote public art. I would buy existing billboards and hire starving artists to paint upon them. That's it. Art not only for art's sake but also for the sake of reminding us all that while commerce matters, it's not the only thing that matters. In fact, I would even argue that while commerce gives us the tools to survive, art makes the effort worthwhile. That's why the art would be on billboards; since billboards are a medium for the marketplace, so placing something upon them with no conceivable monetary benefit would create cognitive dissonance leading to some sort of break in the dull, seamless routine that grinds around in the American middleclass consumer brain.
I remember hearing some anthropologist say on the radio once that Homo sapiens should be renamed Homo manipulans because what really characterizes us is not our knowing stuff but our desire to change stuff. I would take that one step further and say that our most unique diagnostic feature is not only our desire to change stuff, since other animals do this as well, but our desire to change stuff in impractical ways, which is what art is. Art is our special talent. Art is us.
So, on the one hand I'd use my resources to innoculate the world against the scurges of humanity and on the other I'd use my resources to promote our most amazing attribute. Then I'd buy some land and build an intentional community out of yurts and earthships. Then I'd dance, play music, raise bees, grow vegetables, socialize and generally enjoy the fruits of this one fucking life that I have.
But, of course, no time for that. I have to drag myself kicking and screaming to work. No, Bill Clinton, it doesn't give my life purpose.
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