Corporate America wastes no time. The Rosa Parks Commemorative 7-11 Big Gulp cups should be in stores tomorrow.
Apple, Inc. posted this picture on their homepage in honor of the civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks, who passed away yesterday. Apple feels the need to honor this woman because she contributed to the overall condition of humanity and benefited the "common good." This is the same "common good" your "common" capitalist enterprise supposedly is working for -- not for profit or power -- but the good of the community. Apple apparently sees its contribution to society to be inspiring others to "think differently", as the advertisement says.
Unfortunately, the different kinds of thinking displayed by a woman who refused to stand any longer and by a multimillion dollar corporation peddling a new iPod every 6 weeks are quite different themselves. The pioneering endeavors of all civil rights activists during that era set in motion the powerful reimagining of a "civilized" society where "all men are created equal" (and women). Apple has thought itself right outside the box, and into total control of the digital music market, once again establishing it as a force to be reckoned with on the shelves of Best Buy and the NYSE trading floor. That Apple would be so daring as to compare their innovations in the industry to the resisting of injustice only further shows how different -- and hypocritical -- they are.
Apple, as a profit-minded corporation has no interests in social justice insofar as it does not directly benefit them. Thinking of such issues might lead one to the question of why spending $300 on a device that cost one-tenth of that to produce in another country is justifiable. Such issues might make one question why the technology gap continues to grow around the world but why America seems to be adding more and more frills their computer-run lives. In fact, weren't computers going to change the future? Make things quicker, easier, safer, cheaper, and more manageable? Wasn't technology going to solve the worlds ills? Now I need to spend 2 hours on the phone with tech support so that I can find out why my Palm Pilot isn't syncing with my PC at the same time I am downloading mp3s and playing Counter-Strike with a dude half-way around the world. Doesn't sound like the kind of social ills a more advanced world was going to solve.
Don't get me wrong. Technology has had its benefits and I own an iPod which I enjoy using very much. I could just do without corporations pretending to be anything but enforcers of pacified conformity and institutional monoliths driven by the dollar. Leave Rosa Parks well enough alone. Don't use her because it is easy and convenient. The fact is, Apple would not have put he face on a billboard for their product fifty years ago. It's
easy to think "different" now. Last time I checked, Eminem-featuring commercials are about as "different" as Apple gets these days. Some dreamer.
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
content
anxious
curious
