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An alternative article for Christmas...
About the man drenched in red paint breathing out red air through his red face mask as he paints 5,000 plastic stars per day
And about the Amazon worker fetching 5,000 packages per day, who was fired for getting blisters.
And the late night informal workers pacing the trains and buses, desperately trying to sell the useless plastic red stars
And the advertising choking the skyline obstructing the view of real life
And the millions of eyes glazed over with shopping center addiction,
And the Hollywood movies droning over and over the same formula. Preaching one story as though life can just be done in one way. One kind of Christmas, one kind of family, one sort of cheesy happiness, one type of house, in the only type of country.
And the people outside Hollywood, outside the United States, outside the means to buy their way up the simplified dumbed down ladder of contentment
And those with other religions and other belief systems
About the beautiful little planet of ours, inundated with corporations dedicated to the extreme task of producing more wrapping paper and packaging and rubbish than jobs, more rubbish than happiness, more rubbish than learning, more rubbish than food
And the pets that are bought then thrown away a year later
And the people who are hired for jobs then thrown away a year later
And anyone who is treated like they are disposable
And the people who buy plastic trees to put in their houses while the old growth forests... die
And most of all, an alternative Christmas article for those who are silenced. Whose chants and cries and complaints and jokes and stories are drowned out by the loud chaos of media hype present packing shopping trolley crashes cars going nowhere piles of towers of plastic bags the utter lack of imagination that goes into a repeated ritual of buying and forgetting that the rest of the world is so sick of being bombed and killed and wrecked and starved and abused with impunity.
RELATED: More than a Hollywood Christmas in the Americas
INTERACTIVE: Christmas in Latin America
Tamara Pearson is the author of The Butterfly Prison
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