Mind In Turmoil
By Faiz Ahmed
Oakland University
I recently made a trip down to Chase Bank to sort something out with the banker. As I was sitting in the banker’s cubicle, I noticed the poster behind the banker. I zeroed in on the poster and I could not help but notice the methods of marketing and advertising that went into the poster.
The Poster was about retirement plans and it said something like “save up for your retirement plans now” and “talk to your banker about the best plan for you”.
“Amusing”… to me the poster was just amusing. I started thinking about all the skills that went into the creation of that poster. Some of the Key words and phrases were bigger than others, some were of bright colors and others were light shades of gray.
The blue color was used quite a lot and all the really big phrases were in shades of blue. The color blue, according to “www.about.com” is a corporate color, because it has a calming effect on the people who view it.
The same website also claims that blue is a banker’s color.
It seemed Ironic to me that the website mentioned blue to be a banker’s color.
The reason why blue is used by corporations and bankers is because blue is the color of the universe and blue has a calming effect on people. Darker shades of blue also symbolize royalty, class and superiority.
Lighter shades of blue convey truthfulness and this is why Bankers use a combination of dark and light shades of blue.
That little bit of research was funny because from my experience bankers are neither truthful nor are they superior, they live off of other people’s money, they try to scam and cheat people and they are always looking for the shortest excuse to level fines at you, bankers are the last people I would like to be calm around.
The main focus of a Bank is to make money off of the money that people gave them for safekeeping.
So coming back to the poster, I looked at it more carefully, it was talking about retirement plans.
Why was the bank so interested in retirement plans? First, why did people need retirement plans? This is an invention of the last 100 years that the bank looks after people in the last part of their lives.
How did people spend their retirement age before banks offered retirement plans?
Their children looked after them!!
Who would ever think of children being their parent’s retirement plan in this modern, progressive and ‘oh so civilized’ day and age!!
So what happened to society that the children left their parents at the mercy of unscrupulous bankers and old age nursing homes who offer them scams for retirement plans.
Well of course, greed is what happened. Materialism is what happened. Unfettered capitalism is what happened.
The breakdown of the institution of family is what happened.
Where people are so engrossed in their money-making that they do not have the decency to look after their parents who brought them up in the parents old age, if this is what the modern age brings and if this is what advancements in science and technology bring then is it wrong to wish to be back in the 7th century?
Even after having two income families, people send their parents away to those concentration camps that they call retirement homes to live on pittances provided by unreliable and untrustworthy banks away from their grandchildren and away from their families.
This is a shame indeed.
There was once a time that families looked after their elders. Then there came a time when children sent their parents away to old age homes. I see a progression in a negative direction here. How did so many people suddenly start behaving like pitiless beasts when it came to their parents?
Maybe because the education, moral and otherwise, was taken away from the parent’s hands and away from the family’s hands and placed in the hands of institutions to whom new students are a raw material to be processed on a factory line and the graduating class a glamorous commodity to be sold to talent hunters.
Commodities that were shiny from the outside but empty from the inside, commodities that were meant to do only one particular function for their entire lives, that is to use their talents to make money for their employers. Virtual well paid, mentally trapped, selfish, immoral, pitiless slaves to the establishment.
Zombies!! Zombies they are, that are ordered to march in a direction by their political leaders who are subservient to corporate interests. Zombies spoiled by luxuries,
Zombies and slaves. That is what the world is full off today. So empty of emotion that they need romantic movies to feel love, action movies to stimulate the emotions of adventure and horror movies to stimulate the emotion of fear. Because the human subconsciously yearns for some real emotions even if it is fear, even if it is tragedy and even if it is hate!
They are so consumed by their selfishness that they can buy the latest cars and the big houses but they cannot take care of their own parents.
But is the education system to be blamed by itself? Is it the lone wolf? Definitely not. It is the tool of the moral defragmentation of human emotionality and morality. But there are other factors involved too. It is the fact that the needs of humans also increased. The so called “Higher standard of living” that came out of the development of the world. But we were told that development is a good thing!! But if development leads me to be dependent on services without with I cannot function in the society, the same services and the goods that lead the earth to be defiled and its resources be abused, and the abandonment of family ties, then that development is indeed a source of corruption. Everywhere modern industrial and technological development went and people accepted it, their ways of life were destroyed and replaced by this glamorous illusion of prosperity.
100 years ago, people lived in smaller villages and everybody in the village knew everybody else. Hardly any crime and definitely no stranger danger. They had schools that taught them skills and morals, the story was same across the board. From Latin America to China. People led simple lifestyles.
But today, people are addicted to watching football games and the reality shows. Today we live in an age where lousy men make merchandize of loose women to be marketed because at the very base of it all, the education system teaches us only how to make money. The world today is at the peak of science and technology, but it is also at the epitome of barbarity, ignorance, immorality and stupidity.
Shameful!!
But to think that the colors used in the poster at Chase bank were blue and were supposed to make me calm in the temple of usury.
First Published With East West Link News - ewlnews.com
Oakland University
I recently made a trip down to Chase Bank to sort something out with the banker. As I was sitting in the banker’s cubicle, I noticed the poster behind the banker. I zeroed in on the poster and I could not help but notice the methods of marketing and advertising that went into the poster.
The Poster was about retirement plans and it said something like “save up for your retirement plans now” and “talk to your banker about the best plan for you”.
“Amusing”… to me the poster was just amusing. I started thinking about all the skills that went into the creation of that poster. Some of the Key words and phrases were bigger than others, some were of bright colors and others were light shades of gray.
The blue color was used quite a lot and all the really big phrases were in shades of blue. The color blue, according to “www.about.com” is a corporate color, because it has a calming effect on the people who view it.
The same website also claims that blue is a banker’s color.
It seemed Ironic to me that the website mentioned blue to be a banker’s color.
The reason why blue is used by corporations and bankers is because blue is the color of the universe and blue has a calming effect on people. Darker shades of blue also symbolize royalty, class and superiority.
Lighter shades of blue convey truthfulness and this is why Bankers use a combination of dark and light shades of blue.
That little bit of research was funny because from my experience bankers are neither truthful nor are they superior, they live off of other people’s money, they try to scam and cheat people and they are always looking for the shortest excuse to level fines at you, bankers are the last people I would like to be calm around.
The main focus of a Bank is to make money off of the money that people gave them for safekeeping.
So coming back to the poster, I looked at it more carefully, it was talking about retirement plans.
Why was the bank so interested in retirement plans? First, why did people need retirement plans? This is an invention of the last 100 years that the bank looks after people in the last part of their lives.
How did people spend their retirement age before banks offered retirement plans?
Their children looked after them!!
Who would ever think of children being their parent’s retirement plan in this modern, progressive and ‘oh so civilized’ day and age!!
So what happened to society that the children left their parents at the mercy of unscrupulous bankers and old age nursing homes who offer them scams for retirement plans.
Well of course, greed is what happened. Materialism is what happened. Unfettered capitalism is what happened.
The breakdown of the institution of family is what happened.
Where people are so engrossed in their money-making that they do not have the decency to look after their parents who brought them up in the parents old age, if this is what the modern age brings and if this is what advancements in science and technology bring then is it wrong to wish to be back in the 7th century?
Even after having two income families, people send their parents away to those concentration camps that they call retirement homes to live on pittances provided by unreliable and untrustworthy banks away from their grandchildren and away from their families.
This is a shame indeed.
There was once a time that families looked after their elders. Then there came a time when children sent their parents away to old age homes. I see a progression in a negative direction here. How did so many people suddenly start behaving like pitiless beasts when it came to their parents?
Maybe because the education, moral and otherwise, was taken away from the parent’s hands and away from the family’s hands and placed in the hands of institutions to whom new students are a raw material to be processed on a factory line and the graduating class a glamorous commodity to be sold to talent hunters.
Commodities that were shiny from the outside but empty from the inside, commodities that were meant to do only one particular function for their entire lives, that is to use their talents to make money for their employers. Virtual well paid, mentally trapped, selfish, immoral, pitiless slaves to the establishment.
Zombies!! Zombies they are, that are ordered to march in a direction by their political leaders who are subservient to corporate interests. Zombies spoiled by luxuries,
Zombies and slaves. That is what the world is full off today. So empty of emotion that they need romantic movies to feel love, action movies to stimulate the emotions of adventure and horror movies to stimulate the emotion of fear. Because the human subconsciously yearns for some real emotions even if it is fear, even if it is tragedy and even if it is hate!
They are so consumed by their selfishness that they can buy the latest cars and the big houses but they cannot take care of their own parents.
But is the education system to be blamed by itself? Is it the lone wolf? Definitely not. It is the tool of the moral defragmentation of human emotionality and morality. But there are other factors involved too. It is the fact that the needs of humans also increased. The so called “Higher standard of living” that came out of the development of the world. But we were told that development is a good thing!! But if development leads me to be dependent on services without with I cannot function in the society, the same services and the goods that lead the earth to be defiled and its resources be abused, and the abandonment of family ties, then that development is indeed a source of corruption. Everywhere modern industrial and technological development went and people accepted it, their ways of life were destroyed and replaced by this glamorous illusion of prosperity.
100 years ago, people lived in smaller villages and everybody in the village knew everybody else. Hardly any crime and definitely no stranger danger. They had schools that taught them skills and morals, the story was same across the board. From Latin America to China. People led simple lifestyles.
But today, people are addicted to watching football games and the reality shows. Today we live in an age where lousy men make merchandize of loose women to be marketed because at the very base of it all, the education system teaches us only how to make money. The world today is at the peak of science and technology, but it is also at the epitome of barbarity, ignorance, immorality and stupidity.
Shameful!!
But to think that the colors used in the poster at Chase bank were blue and were supposed to make me calm in the temple of usury.
First Published With East West Link News - ewlnews.com
Lol you suck!
ReplyDeleteI realize this is a personal blog but because I found this in the eastwestpakistan link website I did expect the writing to have a little more substance...
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, throughout the article you make an extremely long winded connected between the breakdown of what YOU think is 'family' and the rise of 'capitalism' in the west. You make this connected countless times but don't really go into what the connection actually is...just the fact that it supposedly exists..
for example, the average life expectancy 100+ years ago was closer to 40, not 70 or 80 like it is now, so the development of retirement plans was preceded by an increased life expectancy. how did children take care of their parents if their parents died at 40 lolz? Regardless of what the life expectancy was, you don't really explain how capitalism and materialism are related to putting parents in retirement homes.
The article seems like an extremely informal tirade of religious undertones (islam vs. the banking industry) based entirely on immature observation and a brief google search on about.com...is that really the level of 'research' that you put into this?? Anyone can use a color and extract multiple meanings from it. Green can represent envy OR it can represent 'life, growth, fertility' etc. but these associations are largely culturally derived and say nothing about the intrinsic quality of the color.
anyway I don't want to dissect every detail I'm just surprised about the lack of quality of the piece...should it even be called an article? i've seen more thought go into posts people put on facebook...
i am not going to defend my article ... it is self explanatory ... it is not a research article ... it is not a news article ... it is called creative writing ... it is a work of art - if you did not understand what i said now ... inshallah one day you will ... if you dont understand it before you grow old and die ... then you will understand it after that -- peace
ReplyDeletei'm glad you replied. on the topic of creative writing...doesn't the writing have to be creative for it to be considered creative writing? After reading it again, I again see why I took time out of my busy day to comment on what you wrote...it is just a complete mishmash of random, completely unrelated topics. to call your own article a work of art is laughable. i could splatter paint on a canvas and say it's a work of art but it doesn't make it so. i could subsequently suggest that you simply don't understand what my art is, but that also doesn't make my splatter of paint a work of art. Inshallah one day you will understand that maybe someone giving you helpful criticism *might* understand the topic you are writing about even better than you do. nevertheless im happy to see such brilliant creativity coming out of our community.
ReplyDeletemy bad do not mean to be a jerk guess i was blowing off steam. peace dude
ReplyDeleteIrritating. Tell me what i said wrong. Don't tell me about colors. Tell me what I said wrong about banks. Tell me what I said wrong about parents needing their children's support. It was not East West "Pakistan" Link. You might be happy to see this creativity. I am actually disappointed in the number of people like yourself in the Muslim community who will publicly defend usurious banks and people who ditch their parents and have the audacity to call themselves part of the "community". whats your beef anyway? did you ditch your parents or do you work for a bank? You don't even have the guts to respond using your own name. If you wanna bring out the boxing gloves out into my face, at least let me know your name. If you can not do that, then get out of my face.
ReplyDeleteWith all due respect, I did not criticize your position at all, nor make my own position known to you. I simply have a problem with the way you have presented your own ideas. You’re right it’s unfair for me to write my comments without revealing who I am but that’s just the nature of the internet. all the best
ReplyDelete"The article seems like an extremely informal tirade of religious undertones (islam vs. the banking industry) based entirely on immature observation and a brief google search on about.com...."
ReplyDelete.
"for example, the average life expectancy 100+ years ago was closer to 40, not 70 or 80 like it is now, so the development of retirement plans was preceded by an increased life expectancy. how did children take care of their parents if their parents died at 40 lolz?"
.
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really ? you are not criticizing my position? come on now. tell me what i said wrong about haram khor banks and loser children.
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there are certain things that you do not need to spell out. "akhalmand ko ishara hi kaafi hai" those who understand life, understand what i said. and yes it is an informal tirade against the banking industry who took the gold away from the people and now are busy taking the land away.