It is all just a game.

By MN Against Bush


I remember sitting down as a child to play a game called Monopoly. The object of this game was to buy up huge amounts of property, and become such an economic powerhouse that you completely crush your opponents. The object was not to merely have more than your opponents, but to drive them into bankruptcy. You wanted to ensure that if they landed on your property they had to pay you so much money in rent that they would have nothing left.

When your opponent lost everything you were supposed to cheer, you had just destroyed them and that was something to be celebrated. It was just a game they told us, and so we thought nothing of the message this game was actually sending us.

And we thought nothing of it when we watched the corporations play a real game of Monopoly. We watched them buy up all our land, we watched them crush the local businesses, and we saw them put our neighbors into a position in which they could no longer afford to pay their rent.

Those corporations were the winners we were told, they were the ones who worked so hard to put their company on top and those underneath them just did not try hard enough. And so we watched as the small businesses closed their doors because Wal-Mart could offer us more products at a lower price.

We watched as they played Monopoly but we never realized they were playing against us, and so they took multiple turns and we never even got a chance to roll the dice. We lost that game, and now we go to work everyday and get our meager paychecks, our wages driven down because the winners of the Monopoly game decided we weren't worth quite as much as their CEO's condo on Park Place.

And once the Monopoly game ended with us as the losers, the corporations wanted to play another game. This time they pulled out a little game called Risk. This game involved moving little plastic pieces around a world map, trying to defeat the enemy nations. They told us we could watch on TV and moves would be shown to the world, we would be victorious they told us and everyone would cheer our victory.

So we watched on CNN as the lines on the map kept moving, and it showed us how our pieces were being moved strategically into place. Of course when we started the game of Risk they didn't tell us how long it would take for it to end, and so we watched for months and years and people started to figure out that the plastic pieces on the map were not really plastic. They were real people being killed in a real war.

We wanted the game to end. We didn't want to keep playing, but they kept insisting we could not end until someone was victorious. It didn't matter how long the game went on, it didn't matter how many of our units were lost, it didn't matter how much damage we did to the civilians of the “enemy” nation, it was all a game and we needed victory.

But it turns out that even though this game seems to be going on forever, we can start another game while we wait for it to end. This new game they want us to play is called Russian Roulette, and apparently the rules are pretty simple. All we need to do is to simply beat our chests about Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iran and then simply pull the trigger as I will demonst.........


Posted in full with author's permission.

Originally posted at democraticunderground.com: http://journals.democraticunderground.com/MN%20Against%20Bush/137