Scummy scammers scammed my mom.
A modern-day tongue twister, which certainly has me twisted up inside.
It’s an empty feeling watching a bank account balance dwindle and getting nothing in return.
It was easy for me to hate the guy hidden away in a sweaty room with dirty keyboards and knotted phone cords, but the scammers come in all shapes and sizes.
The cable provider was happy to let my mom pay triple the price she needed to. (They had her paying for an Internet package, and she hasn’t used the Internet since 2006!)
And what about political donations? Do these folks care that she forgot she wrote a check last week? She’s given more to PACs than she has to her own children and grandchildren. And have they delivered?
The truth of the matter is many scammers work well within the law. Apparently, a legit company can legally sell a homeowner a warranty that costs $274.59 per month even if they don’t fucking need it.
But People with early-onset dementia aren’t the only ones getting taken.
And it’s not just criminals who scam.
We’re surrounded.
We’re surrounded by these invisible enemies.
Charlatans with persuasive propositions and the right tone of voice.
Politicians behind White House walls, making rules for our lives without asking our input, laying down cement barriers, and dancing on top of them.
CEOs hidden behind the velvet curtain, tucked away in corner offices, their jackets so stuffed with 100 dollar bills and 1-way tickets that they can’t move their arms anymore. No matter, they pay people to invent things that suck in the money for them. And they hire people, good people in search of the American dream (and by that I mean us), to do their bidding.
Billionaires. Should there even be such a thing? Billionaires who have all the joysticks and all the buttons but seem obsessed with finding more. Billionaires who have the connections and admission fees to influence the rule makers, become the rule makers, and tell us how to live our lives. No questions asked.
If I had any one of these invisible enemies in front of me, I would be risking jail time. Not because I’m a tough guy but because I’m so full of anger. So full of a rage that I don’t deserve to have, that I don’t know how to get rid of. And karma ain’t delivering on its promise.
Perhaps this is why we’re so quick to swing at each other: because the real enemies are out of reach, behind bullet-proof glass, far from the danger of a fist.
We can’t punch a credit card company, so we flip off the driver next to us.
We can’t put a CEO in a headlock, so we berate each other endlessly on social media.
We can’t get politicians to listen to us or care anything at all about what we’re going through, so we scream at people down here on the ground for wearing red hats and blue pins.
We can’t track down the bastard Internet scammer who robbed us so we go out into the world and take something from somebody else.
Folks, our vitriol is warranted.
But our haymakers are misdirected.
How do we justly remove the anger from our bodies when the people who gave it to us are nowhere to be seen?
What’s the right thing to do? Should we even care about being right anymore? Or is that just a silly childhood fairy tale? Shackles disguised as friendship bracelets…
My anger needs room to run. And writing letters to suits who don’t read them ain’t cutting it anymore. I’m sick of playing defense.
I think we all are.