Hard as a pillow... Soft as steel...

 

So to toughen up, you seek strength and comfort—in purchases. You hit Wal-Mart instead of Nordstrom’s. Target over Neiman Marcus. You buy Starbucks in the grocery store instead of at a Starbucks. It’s two credit cards instead of four. You get “cultured”—by listening to “world” music and “alternative” bands. You pepper your speech with references from obscure writers and foreign flicks. You stuff your gut with fusion cuisine from tragically hip restaurants. You train for one of those WALK/BIKE FOR THE TRAGEDY/DISEASE OF THE MONTH’s. You cop a Bally’s membership to build some soft workout muscle hoping people softer than you will say, “Hey have you been working out?”

And to feel like even less of a cog in the machine, you periodically shoot at clay pigeons: Fast food, Reality TV, pop divas, conservatives, and gentrification—all while living in soft, conservative neighborhoods with nice (white) people while smoking, eating French fries, and sub-referencing your life away. You front like your job doesn’t matter, knowing full well the main reason your timesheets look like a NASDAQ chart is because your job is the only thing that matters.

Corporate America makes people soft.

In fact, the only truly hard things in Corporate America are the buildings: Sun blocking, shadow-casting, stoic, cold, hard buildings. They’re usually leased to these hard-hearted LLCs, parent companies, multinationals, or whatever bit of corporate slang you’re partial to. They’re mostly all the same: androgynous, amorphous, gluttonous behemoths all doped-up on cash flow and quarterly projections. And they all eat the same meal: Daily human sacrifice.

Corporations need bodies to perpetuate their own existence, coal for the furnace. So each day, the masses sacrifice a little more of their souls, a little more of their talents, a little more of their perspective, and a little more of their humanity. They’re farm-raised on a steady diet of BS, brass rings, and carrots dangled on strings until their brains, personalities, and abilities are squeezed dry like used condiment packets. And if they behave themselves long enough, the volcano gods reward them with a plaque or a watch plus just enough money so they can sit down in retirement and grow softer until they lie down and die.

Unfortunately, by the time I realized this I had gone soft myself. By 17, I could identify a gun’s caliber by the sound of the shot alone. Growing up, guns were everywhere. Just about everyone I knew under 30 who wasn’t dead or in jail had heat: gangs, dealers, storeowners, kids, nervous neighbors. The cops didn’t come around to protect and serve as much as they came to search and seize. We didn’t have hospitals we had clinics. We had 5 liquor stores for every grocery store and at least one trash-filled vacant lot for every 3 houses or apartment buildings. Everyone was getting shot up, locked up, caught up, and if you were a girl, knocked up. Weed ‘n’ crack were (and still are) easier and cheaper to get than cigarettes or fresh milk. But again I’d become too soft to care. Why? Because Corporate America gave me a door.

I was 21 years old and they gave me my own door. Granted it was a small door to a just-cleaned-out janitor’s closet-turned-office. But it was my door. It was a door to my little desk with my little beige Mac Classic and my little manila folders. It was a door I could slam. I was so broke at 21 I was still living at home with my folks; even at 21 I couldn’t slam home doors without catching leather to the backside. (My parents were not soft.) But no matter. I could go to work, make three hundred bucks a week and slam my own door whenever I felt like it.

Plus, I had a window: an 8-story view of Michigan Ave. just off the Chicago River. When I got bored I could stare out my window and watch cops on horseback, movie crews filming stuff, parades, tourists and suburbanites, luxury cars stuck in traffic, sightseeing boats floating up and down the river, pretty corporate women strutting up and down the street, fancy storefronts with overpriced merchandise in the window displays… Man, I had a view.

At home, I had a view: Graffiti’d up walls, streets Swiss-cheesed with potholes, broken liquor bottles, rolling papers, used condoms. Schools that resembled warehouses and functioned like temporary storage facilities. Mini-Tupacs, pseudo-Goodfellas and bad cops, junkies and alcoholics. Pushers and hustlers, apostolic churches and liquor stores, chicken ‘n’ fish and gyro shacks. Plus lots of hardworking Black folks raising families in brick bungalows and aluminum-sided apartments trying to get by. But in Corporate America, even when the weather sucked, even when the hours sucked, even when the pay sucked, I still had my own door and my own view.

I’m telling ya’, these walls are funny.
First you hate ’em, then you get used to ’em.
Enough time passes you get so you depend on ’em…
That’s “institutionalized.”
—Red, Shawshank Redemption1