The Carrot and The Stick

A short monologue about the carrot and the stick of society.

From the moment we are old enough to go to school and understand such things as poverty and jobs, and we are asked what we want to be when we grow up, it is all the carrot and the stick. When you want to move a horse, you can use two methods: lure it toward your destination with a carrot, or wack it with the stick to scare it away from where you don't want it to go. 

The carrot: a life where you can be whatever you want to be, if you only try hard enough and go through school and work hard to go to more school. Then maybe, if you work hard enough, a family and a home. 

The stick: Look at that homeless man on the streets. Feel that sickness in your stomach? That is dread. The stick is not going to school, not getting into college, not getting a job, somehow getting sucked into a drug addiction, and ending up on the streets. 

It has always been there, in the back of your head, lurking like a cloud. The carrot and the stick. It keeps most of us in line well enough, and one day we will realize that not everything is so black and white. Sitting in our offices, at our desks, wondering where all our hopes and dreams fled to. We took the carrots, but we were lied to. We still have to work, work, and work 5-7 days a week to keep our privilege. And we are the lucky ones.

The system ignores the ones that went for the carrot but fell to the stick.