I have read and reread John Huer’s Aug. 8 column [“So you are now a property owner!”]. He called out so many truths that I am ready to move back onto my boat or into a camper van just to get back to simple again. And yet I kept choking on his last paragraph because I do not agree that the wealthy own us. We can make our car “go” because we own it and choose to turn it on. Cars do not go on strike, but people do. An economy’s puppet masters want to own our labor, but they can not make us work. They try to own our ideas, but we are still free to think whatever we want. As for love? No, the rich profit off of a weak stand-in termed sex or porn, which are only fake imitations of the real thing. And our souls? Capitalism places no price on a soul because it has no place for one. And while you can repossess my car, which is property, I still fail to see, after two months of re-reading Huer how in any theological hell anyone short of G-d can own anyone’s soul. Just my two bits.
Stefan Topolski
Shelburne Falls