(Modified 6/29/2001, preceding my comments by the actual "prayer.")
-----

"A Prayer to the Global Corporate Gods

"O mighty global corporations, we are helpless without you. Please bring
your menial jobs here to our nation and town. Though we have little
control over these arbitrary and tedious jobs that create wealth for
stockholders rather than us, they are all that we lowly workers deserve.
Grant us your x dollars per hour so that we might have hope of
purchasing your fine plastic products that bestow lasting contentment.
Forgive us when we question your authority or do not work fast enough,
for we are but wretched servants, and please oh pretty please do not
cast us onto the street where there is much weeping and knashing of
teeth. 

"For those few hours when we are not in your service, thank you for
blessing us all with the security of predictable name brand products,
and for their copious packaging that assures that no heathens have laid
their unclean hands on the wondrous gifts within. Continue to spew your
intelligent poisons into our farmland and food to protect us from the
sinister insects and microorganisms. Prepare our food and even serve it
to us, that we may have more time to serve you. We will gladly consume
whatever you hand down to us, for you are all-knowing. 

"Please pacify us with a plethora of prefabricated entertainment, as we
have forgotten how to entertain each other. Reveal to us through your
inspired media what we are to believe, for surely we cannot trust our
own feeble judgement. Similarly commodify any remaining life activities,
so that our angst-ridden existence is no more challenging than a series
of multiple-choice questions. 

"Most important, guide your wise politicians financially as they strive
to make this region of the planet more cost-effective for you by
abolishing the evil worker rights laws, corporate taxation, and
environmental protections that offend you deeply and drive you away from
us. Help them enlighten the more backward cultures by dropping your holy
bombs on the people of those demonic nation-states that still refuse to
bow down before you. 

"And thank you for undercutting the pitifully small local businesses
that would dare defy your divine dominance and threaten the sacred
homogenous culture in which you have safely wrapped us. Truly all
resources belong to you, and we are but humble stewards of them.
Continue to devour the land and excrete into the rivers --- the Earth is
your banquet and your toilet. For thine is the empire, the power, and
the planet, until you destroy it. Amen.

"Copyright 1996 BiggerTheyCome (TM) Enterprises, a wholly-owned subsidiary
of GlobalGobble Corporation.  Just try and steal this intellectual
property, you peasant, and see what happens!"

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	Dated:   8/20/1998

Dear People who are recipients of the 
	"Prayer to the Global COrporate Gods":

I thank you, God, for the ability to serve others, even if it 
is in a menial capacity.  Thank you for giving me the gifts of:
   * sight, so that I can see and respond to others' needs;
   * hearing, so that I can hear and respond to others' needs;
   * touch, so I can feel others and be careful of others' wounds;
   * smell, so I can behold the manifold fragrances in the world,
     whether of trees, flowers, or my human neighbors;
   * taste, so that I may enjoy the ability to partake of food and
     sustenance, to give me strength to carry on the work of love
     and responsibility.

Thank you for the ability to make money, even if minimum wage; and
thank you for the ability to do something in this world to feel 
useful, not just for my own needs, but for others' needs as well.

I thank you, God, for menial jobs.  The rich can have their 
headaches, their ulcers, their rich diets, their fast and powerful 
cars and their square-mile estates that keep them away from other 
humans and the human warmth of true love.  The rich can have 
their plenty of plenty, and may God bless it.

I thank God for monetary systems and corporations.  Although they
may be unfair to many, and in these days promote further separation
of classes, they do have many good people within them, trying to do
their part in making our world even just a little bit of a better
place.  I thank God for the humility that allows me, a former com-
puter contractor making over $20 per hour, to seek and enjoy employ-
ment as a Hotel clerk making far less per hour.  I thank God for the
ability to work with other humans, humans who are good people, even
some are occasionally as confused as I am.

The Almighty Corporation, such as it is portrayed in that sad prayer,
is indeed culpable for many things.  But we must not forget that
corporations are peopled with people.  We must not forget that the
choice that each of us makes in pursuing (or not pursuing) our car-
eers, to be happy or not happy, to be complaining and resentful or
to be content and accepting, is our *own* choice.   Corporations to
blame for nursing homes?  I think not; that's a social and societal
issue of individuals who decide to warehouse their parents rather
than nurture them.  It's a sign of a society whose value systems have
gone awry.

Some of us attempt to "escape the indoctrination of [society's] dol-
lars," by trying to learn how to love better; how to give better what
they most lack, such as friendship skills, or service.  Not everyone
chooses controlled substances that fry the mind; nor does everyone
choose depression that fries the mind as well (if that is a choice).

Perhaps I am alone here in being a recipient of this prayer in my 
never having had to live on the street or go hungry for days.  
Maybe not.  There is a lot of anger and blame in that poem that I 
have not had the opportunity to have lived a life where that anger 
and blame is something I can identify with.  So these comments 
are biased.  Even so, I have to wonder at the disempowerment of 
these words, the hateful nature of blame and self-pity that are 
liberally mixed in the words of that prayer.  This is a "prayer" 
to help those who feel angry with the world to feel angrier.  This 
is a "prayer" to help those who feel sorry for themselves to feel 
even more self-pity.  These are words that do NOT bring more peace to 
the world; and yet they do make one think!  I do not like this prayer, 
but it does make one think!

Do we really value increasing misunderstanding in the world?  Do we
really value hating people who are "privileged" when we ourselves
claim not to be?  And those of you who are indeed seeing this email:
Just how underprivileged do you feel?  You who have access to the
Internet either through your own computer or someone else's?

Are we wanting to find a more peaceful way to ask the world and
the universe of humanity for more equity and fairness?  Are we
interested, really, in humaneness or war?


				Cordially,
				Dave Eisenstein