Response to: This American Life - The Fix Is In

           Is the fix in as we speak? Are we being decided for by some higher power or authority? In this episode of This American Life, we are told the true story of the fix being used in the worldwide liquor market. Men, sitting around a table, controlling the financial market of their sales, and doing it in such a simple manner. As if they held the smile of a friendly milkman, but were really robbers in disguise. They were going to control the market and steadily keep upping their prices as a unit, without anyone's knowledge of their corruption.
          This makes me question if the fix has always been in. The story of Mark Whitacre uncovering his own discrepancies, and the discrepancies of the company he worked for, was one of the few that anyone has ever known. What other fix's are we blind to? Are they existant in our everyday life? Is there anything we can really do about them, or is this fate that has taken charge? We must ponder that the fix may not always be in financial terms, but maybe in other situations too. It may just be the things we think happen by chance, really don't happen that way at all.
          A movie called "The Adjustment Bureau" has just recently premiered in theaters. Although I have yet to see it, I have some inkling of what the movie is about, just by reading it's title. Supposedly, there is a group of men who control the events of the world. Imagine, if everything is set for the human race, even in our own individual lives. Who you marry, how far you accel successfully, and every other factor of your life is determined for you. As if the human race is a colony of ants, with children, dictating them. The children tease the ants with food, stomping on a few here and there, taking them from their mortal life. Helpless and unarmored, even defenseless and fateful, the ant's don't even have prayers to save them.
         Will it always be a wonder if the fix is in? Or will we discover more and more what has been decided for us? Do we really even want to know, or are we content with nonchalantly taking things as they come? Like someone backpacking through Europe savouring every experience and not questioning how they came to be, loving them and cherishing them whether they are beneficial or deteriorating to their sense of self. I feel we must pry at what we find occult, until our knuckles bleed and the skin under our nails comes one with the bones that are it's structure. We are so unique, and deserve a say in what happens to us, we can never allow the fix to be in.