Choose Your Hunger and Freedom

Matted blonde hair was still damp from the drizzle earlier.
Her partner once approached me when I purchased a burger, and I got two more for them.
Maybe she didn’t recognize me, or rather adhered to some arbitrary code of not exhausting all resources all the time.
I refueled my car without being interrupted.

Earlier that week I watched a standard social-media lament: We’re slaves to the wage. Entrapped within the system, tethered to the cubicle and late-capitalist horrors.
We’re not meant to live like this.

The girl with matted blonde hair was free. No mortgages, no bills, no middle-management demons to eviscerate her sense of self-worth. No reporting on sprint progress, no accountability on whereabouts. No house. No food.

Maybe the super-rich have it all… All the choices? They can sail on yachts all day long, sipping cocktails in the wake of a perfect sunset each day. But even that exacts a cost, because someone has to build the yachts, maintain them, and probably crew them. Even if we’re meant to reside in paradise, someone will be tasked with cleaning up the after-parties in that utopia.

And here, within the mediocrity of the middle class, there’s also a choice: to help those pathetic figures huddled beneath lights and dirty walls that bear testimony to frequent urination, alcohol spillage, and stale smoke. Sometimes it means sacrificing one coffee, or a few chocolates, to buy a meal that could address systemic malnutrition for just this one moment in time. Tomorrow nothing will change. But now, you can choose your little sacrifice, and choose whose hunger to feed.