It’s Monday morning, and you are again reminded that you are a worker drone. You work in a profession with lots of contact with the general public, so you put on your best-mannered façade. The public can be rude to you, yell at you, and you must be the friendly embodiment of company service. You yourself have virtually no personality, so that you tend to forget by midweek that you are anyone at all. Your boss is the only one entitled to have an opinion or criticism. So, all of those years of critical thinking in college have landed you a job as “the great American working stiff.”

As a working stiff, you are a puppet, more dead than alive. The world holds you intensely accountable. Who are you accountable to? You are accountable to all of the corrupt politicians, lawyers, doctors, corporate executives and the like who pull your strings. The left steals half of your earnings to house and feed crack heads, prison inmates, and the like. The right steals the other half to line their pockets, buy yachts, and build extensions to their homes. You are right in the middle, right between the legs of the beast. That’s it, you are the one getting screwed.

It’s an odd fact that the hardest-working, most patient, and fair people in our society get the shaft more than anyone else. We are nickled and dimed half to death by our puppeteers.

A little bit of color, a dash of personality in our drab lives would be refreshing. Our worlds require something more than just a Dilbert cartoon to adorn our cubicles, something more than a goofy mug in the sink that has unknowingly been spreading influenza throughout the drone empire. We need Picasso to come in and give our bosses three eyes and four ears, in blue. We need Cristo to wrap the whole freakin’ building in purple paisley satin.

Oh, yes. We also would also like the liberty to tell rude people to put it where the sun don’t shine. We’d like the freedom to tell the dolts exactly what we think of them. Without losing our jobs, that is.

And we’d like to see some accountability for our higher-ups. We like the corporate execs and the politicians to join the crack heads in prison. It wouldn’t be no resort prison, neither. It would be a full-fledged correctional facility, where you dare not drop your soap in the shower.

So, you now have some food for thought this evening as you chug down a congested highway back to your starting square. You can curl up onto that nice puffy pillow and dream of cutting the strings. The puppet is free.