Kroger, the large supermarket chain, has a "club" called Booster, that gives members a few nifty discounts, and some free perks like home delivery. I did a 30-day Trial Offer a while ago, but cancelled it before I'd have to pay because of the price: $99.99 for a year of same-day delivery, or $69 if you can wait till the next day for your stuff. It's just not worth that much to me. But I still shop there a lot because they're the closest grocery, and for over a decade I've been enrolled in their Kroger Plus loyalty promotion, so from time to time they send me email with Special Offers.
The latest offer, which was worth something, was 50% off a year's Boost membership, so I took it: I got the whole-hog same-day-delivery package for $49.99; the discounts and perks make that an acceptable deal. But the kicker was something I hadn't noticed before: that includes one year of free streaming video from Hulu, which I had paused for 12 weeks to save myself $10.49 a month and had been thinking of cancelling outright. So right before I paid for Boost I did cancel my extant membership; now for $49.99 getting a thing worth $125.88 for free.
The additional discounts over a year would probably not have totaled over $99.99, but $49.99 should be worth the investment, and there is definitely a place for free deliveries. For several years until pretty recently I'd had to trudge out sometimes for over a mile each way in all kinds of weather to bring home a couple weeks' worth of groceries, which is what people who can't afford a car used to have to do. Imagine pulling a shopping cart 1.5 miles each way in a blizzard because you can't put it off any longer, you've already run out of things like toilet paper and soap and milk and coffee and bread, and now you need light bulbs because the one in the kitchen ceiling just burned out and the 40 watt in the beside lamp just won't cut it.
So Boost is now my third "special membership" that delivers for free, the other two being Amazon Prime and Walmart Plus. Because I can, and because I have use for what they provide, this year I'm spending a total of $182.30 to have goods delivered right to me (or to the front desk downstairs in case of non-perishables). And I get my money's worth in free deliveries, especially considering that I don't have to walk or take the bus a mile or more just to buy a can of coffee and a pencil sharpener. And the cumulative discounts might equal the membership cost; now that I think of it I should start doing that math pretty soon. And at least one tenant in this 11-storey apartment building is bound to have something delivered every day, so I'm not poisoning the planet with a lot of extra carbon.
So you see I am a trained consumer. I even buy from major corporations that have been known to unduly exploit their workers, including UPS and whatever other services do the delivering, and I pay yearly fees for that privilege. Fifty years ago I'd've regarded people who so such things as brainwashed counter-revolutionary scum, because it's hard to argue that such things ultimately benefit The People more than they hurt us. Things like this keep late-stage capitalism from collapsing, contributing to such dispensable evils as mass death in Gaza and slavery on Cambodian shrimping boats. In order to make my life a bit easier I am increasing the share of human misery all over the Earth.
So for these and other similar reasons I've been finding it impossible to avoid at least my share of shame, guilt, and self-hatred for what I have to do just to live another day. Even when I don't intend to hurt anybody, or when I rationalize that a UPS driver having to piss into a bottle beats not having a job at all, I still incur moral demerits. In my youth I was seldom troubled by such things, as the ascetic lifestyle that almost unbearable poverty left me with at least meant that I was less "privileged" than most other Americans, that doing without whatever I absolutely didn't need and buying used clothes from thrift stores meant I could contemplate a sick and starving child without feeling that it was my fault. I wasn't a lot better off myself: I often went hungry without it symbolizing anything. Now that's no longer true.
As with many other of life's "negatives" I console myself that I'm not THAT bad: I'm not directly personally responsible for starving any particular baby, and I contribute to such evils less than most Americans my age, and I don't feel that such things are my right as a privileged character. Comparatively speaking my heart is in the right place. With this self-defensive appeal to proportion I've been able to live for 62 years, more than half of those in what my not-too-distant ancestors would have regarded as lordly luxury; I have not yet felt driven to set myself on fire for the sake of moral principle. Indeed it's hard to imagine hating myself enough to actually do that, however intellectually appropriate it seemed at several points for several reasons. Furthermore I can claim with some self-evident justification that nothing I do or refrain from doing will have any measurable effect on the sum of human misery. A lifetime of insignificance and triviality exempts me from the ranks of noteworthy monsters. Not even being a "despicable Zionist" really counts for anything.
So with that in mind I've just lived through another of my significant anniversaries, another of those dates when putting an end to myself would be making a point. Granted most of these dates are entirely personal, you'd have to be well-acquainted with me and my history to know what I picked that day, but being well-acquainted with me ought to show that suicide has always been my particular temptation. I never really needed a special occasion to perform a sudden landing. Every day I live is a day I've chosen to.
The current problem is that now I'm running short on consolation prizes, I'm not getting as much reward from life as continued behavior warrants, and the trend of current events in today's USA gives me less hope for the future as well. It's getting harder and harder to justify arrogating to myself those sins I commit simply to stay alive. I can't shake the feeling that somewhere in the Third World there's an emaciated toddler who's dying of diarrhea because I don't want to walk a mile to buy groceries.
But now I have another site to stream free cheesy movies from.
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