I believe it was about five years ago when someone mentioned an abstract societal game to me called Planking. The whole purpose of the game is to lie on objects horizontally, face down, with arms alongside the body. You can do this on any object, and the more obscure it is, the better the planking experience. Hearing it described left me wondering why anyone would do this.
When I researched the game it became obvious to me that this game was one of a submissive positioning, but why on physical entities? Scanning through the images on the internet, the faces of the ‘game’ players were of a numbed, docile and submissive array of societal experience and expression. In a world where most of us have succumbed to the concepts of capitalism and consumerism, have we become submissive? Are we expressing our chains to it through our subtle insertions of games like this? Are the objects we are planking on, and over, now our owners and our own undoing?
American consumerism is at an all-time high, leaving many families with insurmountable amounts of debt. We have submitted to capitalistic ideals and cannot find an escape route. Lying down on the objects creates an almost surreal confession of the power they have over us. Finding obscurity while planking is simply a way to express the relative experience of the new world of buy and pay. We are bought, and we are planked to these objects like no other generation before us. We have consumed our planet to the point of animal extinction, polluted oceans and global warming.
I looked up the history of planking and soon discovered images of early slave ships showing people chained down in the same submissive position, unable to escape and to be free from the hateful ownership of history. As society inserts an obvious connection to a human history of racism, have we also unknowingly projected our own experience onto what is now a universal one – materialism and product consumption through spending?
This is where history inserts itself into the present and societal norms are questioned – as they should be. Is it normal to want to live a life filled with products and objectification? Racism has now become a platform for politics in the US and if we don’t look more closely at why cynicism relies on us being divided, we will never find a cure for hate. We will indeed be planked to the past and smothered with consumerism if we don’t finally look at why we need to be submissive.
The whole functioning of the ‘haves’ is to make sure anyone who doesn’t have, doesn’t get. We become almost systematically mesmerized with the accumulation of ‘stuff’ and are losing our moral compass and compassion. Think of the Black Friday sales where people are pushing and shoving to buy one more thing to bring home and yes, to be planked to.
And if people do not have, they will find an escape route to get it, as history proves over and over again. As American politicians rally for support for votes, they are also cynically bribing the population without wealth, blaming the minority populations for the lack of it, and for the taking of it – planking people once again to hate, all in the name of consumerism.
It’s a long, painful history that continues to repeat itself. The greatest thing we can do as a human population is to finally break the chains that our minds have been tightened with; release our intellect to combat the immoral and unethical need to submit one’s self to anyone or any ideal. Then and only then will we be a true democracy. Then and only then will the game of planking end and the world will stop looking for scapegoats. Change is only possible through awareness.
Photo Credits
Photo by Melinda Cochrane – all rights reserved
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