A quick rant about society- “Mother Culture”

Her voice makes puppets out of our willing limbs, and we give ourselves over to her careful guidance and instruction not because we are foolish but because she knows what we want. She knows what is best, and what is easier, and moreover, she knows how to take care of us. Mother culture is a nurturer, and benign or malignant as she may be, she deserves recognition for the parenting of an entire civilization.

            Mother Culture lives within most, but is known by few. She sneaks inside the ears of every teacher in every day school, who regurgitate her words and her knowledge. They in turn are spoon fed to every child, who then comes to believe that his/her only objective in life is to get into a college, and find happiness nestled in some obscure desk job, grow old, and die a peaceful death in their dreamless sleep. Mother Culture does not understand the value in recess, and scolds children as they look at spiders instead of study for exams.

Mother Culture takes up residence in our neighborhoods, and urges us to cut our grass, so as to avoid the discomfort of letting the wild breathe in our own laundered homesteads. She praises gardeners, and urges suburban families to use cleaning products, her words taking the shape of, “Susie don’t touch that, do you know where that’s been?!” And it is in this way she inhabits the parents, touching on their innate love for those that they have given life, and squeezing those intentions until they are warped, exaggerated to the point of hilarity. Every tear and every whine is countered with toys and trinkets and shiny new things, always, always new.

 So she lives inside commercial advertising, and inside tireless spokespeople, inside their lineless faces, so full of the desire to please. They are selfless people, really. Mother Culture saves almost equal adoration for the consumer though, because she thinks that every human in our world deserves to own things, lots of things. Things are good, she thinks. Even other living things can be owned, sacrificed even, if it means more and new and more new. The textbooks nod their agreement, reading; our environment, our oceans, our deserts. Mother Culture lives inside of shopping malls which continually grow like scabs over our bloody woodland. But she does not think that people want to see the ground they are stepping on for what it truly is so she takes care of us by covering our eyes in the appropriate moments, turning our heads to look instead at smiling logos and magazines in the check out line. Mother Culture has assured us that the world is our oyster and we are free to consume it until it is nothing but a lackluster shell.

She has even snuck her way in between the dusty covers of bibles, and in Genesis she has made herself known for thousands of years. All life on earth was made to live under the dominion of mankind, and so. Though we have kept true to the principles of Genesis for thousands of years, Mother Culture never forgets to emphasize the fact that we have changed since then, and changed greatly. She makes absolutely certain that we realize this, that we tiptoe around our past, careful not to tread on and awaken it. In fact, it is best that we ignore it. Or better yet, learn to be repulsed by it. We can hear Mother Culture whispering, accentuating the voice of a half interested tour guide, as we walk through a museum featuring aboriginals. Their bones and their tools are just so… unfortunate. “It’s a relief the artifacts are behind glass,” she says, “much too dirty.” Thank God we don’t have to live in symbiosis with the fleas, in squalor. People largely agree with this sentiment, too. Mother Culture guides our hands away from ancient straw and dry facts, and into our back pockets, where our cell phones are vibrating with some new complication to our lives.  Exhaustedly, we glance down at the screens which hurt our eyes and sigh. Mother Culture pats us on the back, proud of the fact that we are so much happier now. One large, happy family, of amnesiacs.