The 30 Most Influential People in My Life / #30

Telling it like it is!

#30: Robert Greenwald: New Interest Through Misguidance.

I used to like Walmart as much as anyone else.  After all, it serves a good purpose for consumers—to provide a good standard of living for people on a low income—which equals a good purpose overall, right?  Wrong.  Or so I used to think.

Robert Greenwald was the director of a documentary from 2005 called Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, detailing the following social issues surrounding it:

• Elimination of competition
• Paying low wages to associates and influencing other companies in the service industry to do the same
• Anti-union practices
• Environmental degradation
• Exportation of U.S. factory jobs to sweatshops lacking in basic human rights
• Corporate greed; and
• Crime in parking lots

—concluding with inspiring stories of how people kept Walmart out of their towns.

Yet what Greenwald and his film failed to realize can be summed up in the description on the back of the DVD case: "a film that will change the way you shop."  In today's America, shopping at Walmart is like having a weight problem: some people choose to do it, but others simply have to because they can't afford to shop at more expensive stores.  In fact, now that I have a bank account, I am myself on a low income and found myself in the latter situation.  So if I had to shop there, I would without a problem.

Nevertheless, I used to, like a lot of other people, throw the term "evil" around, applying it to many things, from Walmart to my seventh-grade history teacher.  But when I was 14, while browsing the Web after I got wrapped up in my own bias, I requested a book called The Most Evil Men and Women in History, which changed all that.  It got me interested in the topic of evil, and our family's receiving the Internet starting in January 2007 assisted me in my quest to write my own take.

Miranda Twiss, author of the original, included sixteen people spanning from Ancient Rome to the Amin regime in Uganda in the 1970s.  My take, which I've been working on since March 20, 2008, was originally of 100 people, but I shortened it to 50 after realizing that most of the misdeeds of the people in the latter half were taken from pure propaganda.  I am still working on it to some extent, but I plan to counteract it with 100 people who were actually "good."