Potential?

The owner of the Thai restaurant I go to regularly, has been trying to convince me to got to Vietnam. He tells me when the best season to buy tickets is, and where to go, and how the women will treat me, and so on. What's interesting to me, is how this man, who I'm guessing is in his mid thirties, owns multiple Thai restaurant chains, in like four different countries, thinks the idea that the places he suggests for me to go (Hotels, clubs, restaurants other than his own, massage parlors) only hire women in their late teens to early 20's, before their family sends them off to what he called, Labor Farm (sounds like some kind of Slave Camp to me), which is why these women will flock to young, unwed tourists, to try and get Married, and taken from their home country for freedom. He was laughing about this, as though it's a great system of young, female exploitation.

I could tell by his tone, that it wasn't like he was necessarily a cigar-puffing elitist about it, but more that he saw it as simply “the way it is in the Asian culture”, which is exactly how he described it. I just thought it was weird that he saw me, as someone that would somehow appeal to that sort of exploitation. Maybe because through our various conversations we've had while waiting for my noodles, (because I go there a lot), I admitted that if Prostitution was legal and regulated here in Washington, I would probably partake. But that isn't out of some strange, false sense of exploitation, but rather an agreed exchange of services.

Anyways, I told him that I thought there should be some Federal regulation to prevent that kind of discrimination against employment opportunities. But he did say something kind of compelling, he said that in Vietnam, it is truly a Free Market. So long as local businesses are making money, the government doesn't really care how it’s done, even if it means not having laws of “Fair Employment Opportunities”. This got me thinking, “Oh yeah then, FUCK the Free Market.” If it’s about Profits at the exchange of human dignity and the prevention of one’s utility for labor, then that is just one more, out of many reasons, that the monetary system is truly obsolete. Now I don’t want to travel to Vietnam, or anywhere else, really. I just want this grid to crash now. So what went from a friendly conversation about Traveling to exotic places, meeting new and interesting people, and enjoying beautiful women, went to a dark, Nihilistic consideration for what I just can’t stand about this era.

The utter loss of human potential.