I am a shoe.

I am a Nike Converse sneaker. I represent individuality and resisting authority. I'm worn by subversive rebels of all kinds, from Snoop Dog to Kurt Cobain, Johnny Knoxville to The Edge. I'm a symbol of fighting the system and standing out from the herd of lemming-like idiots around me. Yes, I'm a symbol.

But this symbol is a lie. Because of the distinction I afford people they don't look at where I come from. I am so infused with artificial meaning that people forget that I am a shoe. Yes, I am a shoe, made of rubber and canvas fabric, with a distinctly "retro" look without actually pointing to any real time or any real political stance. But this rubber is manufactured and this canvas is sewn together by thousands upon thousands of small, deft brown hands in nations worlds and continents away from where I'll eventually be sold. They work inhumane hours in disgusting conditions. They are essentially paid slaves, and being paid only nominally, only enough to keep them barely alive and economically addicted to their jobs. In fact, in the minute you've taken to read this, the Vietnamese worker making me has earned $0.0013, while my parent company has earned over $36,000. This is because I'm not owned by a subversive or offbeat company. I am in no way connected with the ideas I'm bought to show support of. I am owned by Nike. Nike is a corporation worth more than some governments, with more power than any factory worker could even compete with, and which is currently exacting a terrible and constant tyranny against millions of the non-american brown-skinned peoples of the world.

No, I am not "subversive." "Subversive" never meant anything. I support "the system" by pretending to be fighting it, and pretending that fighting this system is so easy a battle that buying me can somehow help. I represent nothing. I am just another shoe, from another disgusting sweatshop, made by another pair of brown hands, sold by another white businessman. But you're going to buy me anyway.