Once, when I was a young teen, I walked into the dining room at my parents’ house to find my stepdad sitting at the table with a glass of beer, a stack of mail, and a stack of shims in front of him. He was casually opening each piece of mail — they were all credit card offers — and separating the included self-addressed bulk-return-postage envelopes into a third stack. When he’d finished opening them all, he tossed all the credit card application paperwork into the trash, and in between sips of beer, he began slipping a shim into each return envelope, sealing it, and placing it into final stack.
Retired now, the old man was an architect. As someone whose career has been a study in the balance of art and science, he’s always been a measured, careful person with a steady, well-planned approach to every project, from designing a house to making a sandwich. His work had him regularly visiting construction sites, and for this particular project, he’d gone out of his way to collect a stack of wooden shims — “a thin, often tapered piece of material (such as wood, metal, or stone) used to fill in space between things (as for support, leveling, or adjustment of fit).” — that were ideally sized to fit standard business envelopes.
Bulk-mailed credit card offers have always been big business, but it seemed especially so at that time. It was the mid / late 1980s, the age of Wall Street and Gordon Gekko’s “greed-is-good” ideology, the early days of the infamous savings & loan crisis, of fast and loose newly deregulated banking that really foreshadowed the out-of-control mess this nation is in now — unchecked corporate greed and Wall Street hegemony as the result of a bought-and-paid-for, profit-before-people federal government. I didn’t really understand it all at the time, but it was the modern financial wild west, and there were a lot of envelopes from credit card companies on the dining room table.
I sat there for a little while and watched what he was doing — methodically sliding these strips of wood into the return envelopes, sealing them and stacking them neatly, occasionally taking a drink of beer. I finally asked why he was stuffing the envelopes with shims, and he explained that he was tired of getting credit card offers in the mail. It had become the bulk of what filled the mailbox on any given day, and there was really no way stop from them from coming. So he’d decided to do what he could make the banks’ effort cost them a little more than they bargained for.
He explained that the banks paid a weight-based bulk shipping rate for the return envelopes (no stamps required), and by filling them with shims and returning them, he was driving up the cost of the return postage. The weight of the shims was far greater than the weight of the paper applications, and even though he knew it wasn’t making much of a dent in the overall cost of the banks’ mailing operations, any little thing he could do to make them pay more was worth the meager effort. On top of that, he was making them waste man-hours in processing returns, not containing completed credit card applications, but useless pieces of wood.
“It’s the small revolutions…I do what I can.”
I only saw him doing this once, but I suspect it was a campaign he carried on for a while.
As far as acts of civil disobedience go, the ol’ shim-in-the-credit-card-application-return-envelope is a pretty benign foray into the realm of nonviolent protests. But at this point in history, especially now, 8 (or 10…? whatever) weeks into COVID shelter-in-place and the accompanying national economic meltdown, I’ll take what I can get. And frankly, that’s not much.
The more time I spend on lockdown marinading in my own mental funk, the more I read about the corporate donor class getting richer off this shit, and about the people out there protesting the quarantine guidelines designed to ensure their safety — “protests” that are fully orchestrated by national political media, and are nothing more than staged theatrical events attended by suckers — the more I think about this incident from my youth. It was a teaching moment, watching a responsible parental adult doing something that, while pretty minor, was a deliberate act designed to disrupt, if only momentarily and on a minuscule scale, the American corporate finance machine. No fame, no social media flex, just pure antiestablishment intention, acted on with casual intent. Do people still do that?
I saw a bit on Twitter recently about someone who likes filling online shopping carts, then closing the browser tab, which I imagine works better if they’re not logged into whatever site they’re window shopping at. Pretty flaccid as far as civil disobedience goes, but probably satisfying on some level…so okay. I saw another person on Twitter who, instead of doing his work, spent a day in Photoshop attributing socialist quotes (from Ho Chi Minh, Guy DeBord, Fidel Castro, etc.) to conservative American icon and OG neocon puppet Ronald Regan, then distributing them to specifically targeted online locations frequented by baby boomer centrists. Not bad — funny for sure, but really just fish in a barrel.
Trolling boomers on social media and ding-dong-ditching AI shopping carts doesn’t really carry the revolutionary gravitas of returning credit card bulk mail envelopes, which were originally meant to increase the capital burden of working people, filled with harmless yet weighty pieces of wood with the sole intent of increasing the cost of the direct mail program, and wasting the man hours of the schlubs tasked with processing them. That’s a pretty high bar for a low-key revolutionary activity.
Small, solitary acts of selfless, anonymous individualism, apolitical anti-corporate shit-stirring, and positive anti-social behavior…I think that these are some of the bright spots I’m missing in what’s become an otherwise all too drudging existence.
I know social media sucks, but hit me @maxsidman and brighten my day — send me worthy examples of brilliant small-scale civil disobedience so I can know that there’s still something worth believing in. Thanks in advance.
[Adaptive Strategies is a blog series I’m slowly working on while I’m sheltering-in-place so I don’t catch the COVID. Each of these posts is about whatever happens to be going in my head…or they may also be about nothing in particular, because I’m just trying to exercise some mental muscles.]