TWGB: I Deserve a Break Today

 

Have you ever disassociated so hard you imagined that your parasocial enemy was suddenly some fat senior citizen cosplaying a service job because he wanted desperately to snow people into thinking he wasn't an elitist silver-spoon buttercup but could totally ball behind the french fry thing at a fast food restaurant because he had poor people job FOMO? and ...

What the whole entire fuck? 

The Harris Plan--Supporting Our Values

 

What if the way to support families and the middle class was to put our money where our values are and invest in the changes we want to see to make life better for the average American? 

It's a loaded question, and I get why some folks would be mad--supporting new families and encouraging homeownership are fine things for people who want to talk about financial security for households to reference, but actually doing something about it? Isn't that the business of other people to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps about? 

Look, I used to do a feature on this blog about our "Know Your Class War" and just like "Climate Sunday", it fell by the wayside because we have a first-world economy with disastrous outcomes in terms of health, happiness, and upward mobility in general. Democrats have, through measures like Social Security, Medicare, the ACA, and others--actually tried to do something about this. Republicans usually dub these measures "Communism".  (See Reagan and Medicare.)

Labor Day: Is It A Crime?

 

The $7.25 minimum wage can’t pay all the bills in any state https://t.co/wTk5JHdYNQ

— Vixen Strangely (@VixenStrangely) September 7, 2021

We talk sometimes about "working for a living", so I just want to interject that working doesn't always provide a living. It provides the barebones of existing, maybe feeding oneself and ones' kids, inadequately, going into soul-disrupting debt at times, relying on various kinds of assistance at others.

Mayday, Mayday

The photo on the left was an example of Nazi irony: the Nazis expected work without freedom, unless you consider death a kind of freedom. The photo on the right (from a protest against state COVID-19 restrictions in Illinois) seems to be intended, in one light, in a non-ironic way: Having the choice to work (to open businesses) is freedom. But there is also an ironic way of looking at it: other people's labor make the protester free. An open hair salon means someone else works on a person's hair, a restaurant means someone else prepares a meal and deals with the dirty dishes.

These protests are about other people's labor, and other people's exposure to a disease that can be deadly. Being International Workers' Day, it's a good time to point out that loosening restrictions doesn't make many workers free: it gives them the choice of working and being exposed to a disease that can kill, or not working and being unable to collect any kind of benefits--giving them the likelihood of sickness on one end, food insecurity and the threat of homelessness on the other. "Opening the state" sounds like freedom, but it means businesses are forced to open, make arrangements for social distancing at their place of business (which might mean costly alterations) and trying to smartly schedule staffing--and may still not translate into adequate custom to justify the overhead--because most people are still scared to do commerce as usual (and rightly so!).

The paradigm is one in which retail service workers or public transit workers can become ill because of other people's personal decisions. These people are just trying to put food on the table and live their lives, and the freedom to serve other people so that they can pay their bills shouldn't equal death for them.

The Post-Pandemic

As is sometimes the case, regular commenter Formerly Amherst got me to thinking a bit on a different tangent. I don't like the idea of prognostication where serious events are concerned all that much, for the most part, because I think people have a tendency to ascribe their own meanings and desires on things. Where the coronavirus is concerned, I've already noticed with distaste that some people are viewing it in "cleansing" terms--always a bad sign. I don't think much of people who imagine that a random RNA replicant was sent by some fate to rid the planet of, well, you name it. Old folk. The sick. The poor. The Blue State liberal menace. The Red State conservative menace. The people of XYZ religion. The lousy secularists. To give us something greater than war to worry about. To wipe out the lesser virus, humans, who have been mucking the planet up. Etc. It's a very ugly game some people play--and the only way to win at being human is not to play.

I also don't like the habit of thinking that a sufficiently tragic episode of history will necessarily be didactic. The idea that "Now people will--(do the thing I've always really hoped they would)" is natural, but people often do carry multiple, mixed, and even muddled messages away from events. There is a logic to assuming that people will, after a massive worldwide healthcare crisis, come away with dramatically different opinions about how health care is managed, such as incurring an interest in truly universal "free" (as in "provided as a fully-funded right of all planetary citizens") healthcare--but logical assumptions seem to have little to do with actual human behavior. The human mind has a weird trick of using current events to reinforce one's own priors, even when counter-intuitive.

We're talking monkeys. If that sounds like I'm shrugging at the business of guessing what folks will do--bingo. Look at the differing responses people are having right now to the potential for disaster staring them in the face. The aftermath won't look much different. Fingers of blame will be pointed, but it will be spread around enough to be thinned out. Some people will look back, after a plausible or even implausible interval, to say "Things weren't even all that bad."

Happy Labor Day!

Be prepared for sparse posting, as I will be treating myself to a two-week vacation from my paying gig, and might not have much time to post here. I've really only gone more than two weeks without posting when I went to Italy in 2008--otherwise, this little old blog has been chugging for almost eight years now. And I thought I didn't have any attention-span. One of my early posts refers to the oddness I experience when I try to not be at work--my head stays there for awhile. Beer helps. I'll try to sort out some kind of summer reading.

Speaking of vacations--Americans don't really take vacation time, even when they have plenty of it to take. We don't even get as many days per years as many Europeans do, and are still loath to enjoy them. We even feel guilty taking sick leave--which more of us need and which would probably be really healthy for us to have and take. President Obama took a step towards giving more people access to paid sick days recently.

But I understand the mentality behind not wanting to take the paid time--you don't want to have worked so hard to become "indispensable", to then give people a reason to see you as at least "temporarily dispensable", or they might get to looking at your absence as a habit they could grow fond of. Also, if you are working on a certain project, you kind of like to see it out all the way, without leaving it in anyone else's mitts. And finally, some of us just really like being at work. It's a social network, it's a habit, and the work itself might really be interesting.

But mostly it's about trying to be an Iron-man/woman and seem like an indefatigable team-player. Come high water, migraines, or the 24-hour plague.

I'm going to take my Labor Day post to remind people that lots of labor fights went on to get you any time to take at all--and they are meant for your self-care. But I definitely think more needs to be done to ensure that people have access to paid time when really needed for care of oneself, loved ones,  or just really important errands. After all, the people who are least likely to have paid time, handle your food, your children's daycare, eldercare, and work with the public. Maybe it really is best these workers can keep at home when they have a case of awful with a chance of spreading it. Besides which, working through sickness or just overwork fatigue is a rotten thing. Time away is good and refreshing.

So let's celebrate Labor Day, by celebrating the times we just aren't at it.