Monday, November 21, 2011

Who Owns Your Life ?

I was watching NatGeo, a short program on the Inuit in Greenland and how their lifestyle of subsidence hunting is being changed by the Western way of life. All well and good, but not really relevant as I sit here in my nice lounge watching DSTv, until right at the end when a former hunter finally gave up and got a job because “he could not pay his bills, his rent, his phone bill and pay for food”. That simple statement opened a door in my mind and I found myself asking the question, who owns my life ? It seemed absurd to me that people who had never been beholden to anyone all of a sudden could not carry on their old way of life because now they had rent to pay. When I look at my life I realise I don’t own it, the bank does. If I stop working I cannot survive, I don’t own my house, I don’t own my car and even if I did, I could not run it as I would need money for petrol, now horses, they can feed on the grass, for free (more or less). I have spent my entire life striving to own it and be independent, yet if the Spar shut down, how would I eat ? How would I survive without money ? I don’t think I (or anyone else) could ?

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