Poop Bags And Politicians
You have to understand just how nefarious things are before you can appreciate how manipulated we all are. Everything is marketing, everything promises something it doesn’t deliver. Everything is image over substance.
I bought doggy poop bags a while back, and I was under the impression they were good for the environment because they were the same color of green you see with most eco-friendly products. The box they came in was uncolored cardboard, so the bags must be biodegradable, right? Everything about the packaging suggested that I was buying something that wouldn’t harm the environment.
But when I brought them home I read the package carefully and, despite all the imagery and all the eco-sounding words they used, the only thing eco-friendly about the bags I bought to carry my dog’s business in was that the tube the bags were wrapped around was made of cardboard rather than plastic.
Sometime after that I chanced upon a vendor in one of those out of the way, non-corporate places I tend to search out. She was selling eco-friendly products and I asked her about the poop bags she was selling, and she assured me that they were indeed biodegradable. I told her my story about the green poop bags and she told me just how much greenwashing was going on, how hard it was to find Earth-friendly products and how many people are willing to sell wooden toothbrushes packaged in plastic.
It’s a pretty evil thing, companies making people believe they’re making an environmentally conscious choice when they really aren’t. It’s especially evil because many different people within the company have to be aware of what they are doing, that they are not merely lying to people but harming the planet on which we all live. We may have, as a society, stopped seeing the evil in this sort of behavior, but that just shows we’re a society that has come to accept evil as part of our way of life.
Those selling products have become used to the idea of misleading (lying to) people, and people have become used to being lied to. Most of us don’t bother to look closely at the label or — God forbid — do research on what we buy, because it would disappoint us and make our lives so much harder. We prefer instead to believe the lies they’re selling. It’s good to feel like we are doing something responsible without having to be inconvenienced.
You didn’t think I was going to waste an entire article talking about doggy poop bags, did you? And I sure hope you didn’t think I’d waste an opportunity to use shit bags as a political metaphor. Because the same way they market fake eco-products is the way they sell you your politicians.
It’s all about the impression they want to make. The outside is the right color but the inside is the same old shit. It doesn’t matter if the politician is red, black, or brown, it’s the same product. Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed of a day when people were judged not by the color of their skin but on the content of their character. But we today assume that just because someone is a person of color, just because they are a woman, or gay, or transsexual, that they are somehow different. Look deeper, do your research, or you will be left with the same old bag of shit you were trying to get away from. Even Republicans have people of color in their party they point to and say: “see that, we can’t be evil, we have a Black guy.”
Marketers are crafty people. They realize people want to do the right thing. They also know that most of us aren’t willing to work too hard to make sure we do the right thing. If they can sell us with packaging without making any real changes or incurring any real cost, they’re more than willing. They’d rather pay their marketers a little more to mislead us than pay more and deliver the product we really want. And they get away with it. Let me rephrase that: We let them get away with it.
Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Hakeem Jeffries, they will sell you this sort of product all day. Because it costs them next to nothing to put a gay pride flag on their product. It costs them nothing to put a Black Lives Matter flag on the box of shit bags you buy. The question is, and you must be very diligent in researching this, is the product really any different than what you used to buy? Or vote for?
The company selling these shit bags is going to act like it is SO much better than the company that sells the shit bags that aren’t green, because that’s what evil corporations/parties do. Even more important, they are going to try to make you feel like you are oh so morally superior for buying their product. BECAUSE YOU CARE. BECAUSE YOU WANT TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE. Buy our poop bags and we will save the world.
You’re going to have to do the work if you want to save the world. Because the evil people selling evil shit bags aren’t going to do the work for you. They’re content selling you an image while they laugh behind your backs. Hell, they might even believe their product is better because they’re not very bright themselves. Saving the world is not going to be easy, and if it is easy, it’s not real. Their job is to sell you convenience, your job is to demand substance. They are not your friends.
As for me, I don’t believe what they’re selling enough to trust them with my dog’s business.