Into the Target with a longish list. The coffee part is still open so that’s good. But there are no employees on the floor and I can’t find anything. I probably would have bought the camera finally, but there’s no one around to get me a boxed one from the back. So fuck it; later.
I did find cold meds, the orange shit and the blue shit bundled together. I don’t have a cold, but I did a while back and there’s no emergency stash of it in the house.
When I go to pay for it the self-checkout boops and the screen says that An Associate Is On The Way.
The Associate is a black kid, maybe still a teenager. He sees the issue, grabs his scanner, and asks for my ID.
“Not happening,” I say, and that’s all I say.
He begins to dance almost literally and he says a poem about how he doesn’t know what’s going on and doesn’t know what to do. He looks over at his friend, another black man about five years older, and his friend is the star of this scene. He just stands there, smiling a little, with a look on his face that says, “Dunno man, old whitey gonna white.”
The first kid turns back to me, his face lit with an idea. “Not happening why not?” he says.
“Because I don’t want to be in your damn database,” I say.
This seems to make a significant difference somehow. It’s as if he remembers this one, from a training webinar somewhere. He leans over and punches in a very long numeric code from memory, ten or twelve digits, and turns back to me with a smile that says that’s it; all good.
And it was, or at least I guess it was.
***
The other thing was from the radio a day or two back on LatinoUSA again. Not much to it. Just a Guatemalan comic being interviewed, and he was talking about this bit he did.
It was about a new marketing campaign from the Homelanders and the Icefucks. They were promoting their new initiative, proudly announcing that from now on …
All child detainees would be raised in Cage-Free humane conditions!
It’s funny for obvious black humor reasons. But it’s also a pretty biting satire on the tricky world of modern responsible consumerism. Yes, when I buy eggs they are cage-free. And the milk is grass-pastured. And everything is non-GMO at least, and organic if it’s not outrageous in price. I recycle everything.
And so what? For all my virtue signaling and doing my bit to move the market, the capitalist culture I’m supporting anyway is locking up babies, poking Iran with a stick trying for another endless war, and burning the whole store down around us.
If I actually cared that much my ass would be on the line like Dr. Scott in Ajo, or Tim DeChristopher of Utah. Or maybe at least …
I could be a slacktivist blogger!
Oh wait …