So, my work is raising wages.
This is something that's badly needed because since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and the shutdown and coming back to work...we can't keep people, which makes the job harder (no matter what it is) and since people can go to MacDonald's or Walmart (among other places) and make more money, well, lots of people have done exactly that. It's capitalism and a free society, yo. People are going to react accordingly.
(As for the header photo, this is the future Republicans want.)
Anyway, this week when the announcement was made that in June they're giving us all a raise, some people, mostly older white people, complained about it. As if it was the worst thing in the world that somebody else might be making the same amount of money as them. Apparently, some people value the idea that they make 18 cents an hour more than some other person MORE than they value their own wages going up if somebody else's go up too.
Apparently, relative status is one hell of a drug.
Much of the sniping back and forth that I've heard and seen about this is all between older white conservatives. What those people think about the rest of us including our Native American employers I'm not going to bother to speculate, I already get the idea.
Apparently, one hell of a lot of Americans are Stockholm Syndromed to some really fucked up stuff.
And some of the people that I know are just fine with that, if it gives them a tiny little sense of superiority for five seconds.
And on top of that, some people, politicians and religious nuts especially, would rather force women to have babies than make sure that they can support a family...and meanwhile no one, absolutely NO ONE, has the least bit of interest in telling men (particularly white conservative men) to control themselves, keep it in their pants, pay attention to their own religion's teachings regarding sexuality, or even practice safe sex...let alone act like respectable human beings or stick around to support a family. No, the onus for all that is placed on literally everybody else, up to and including the government and our social safety net...which a hell of a lot of these fucking people then in the next breath say they want to get rid of. How in the hell does any of this make sense?
I'm serious, this one weird old white lady that I work with thinks the company shouldn't raise wages and the government should just get rid of all that unemployment and welfare stuff and force people to come back to work. I tried to tell her that it simply won't work that way. She wouldn't hear it. When I point out that in a couple years she'll be on social security...well that's different. But then it always is, isn't it?
Low wages, more people, no protections and fewer resources for those people except for more and more guns with continually less and less restriction on their possession and use, it seems to me that this adds up to a dangerous powder keg that directly contradicts what conservatives say they want, which is supposedly an orderly, static society with them in charge that's kept in place by the use of force. Oh, don't get me wrong, there'd be plenty of that at least in the beginning, until law enforcement and eventually military forces were gradually overwhelmed by (or joined with) vast mobs of armed desperate people. I realize these same fucking people think that they'll have a corps of armed, radicalized followers they can put between themselves and any opposition while they escape, but what happens when those people don't have anything either, when your followers are hungry too they tend not to keep following you if something better turns up, and where do these fucking idiots think they're going to go? Relative status only holds things together for so long when things start to unravel.
Ideology first becomes cold comfort, and then no comfort at all, when reality says you're broke and so is everyone around you.
I've never been especially poor, but in the part of Northern Michigan where I spent my teenage years, generational poverty and poor health outcomes are endemic, and for the most part if people find a way out they don't come back. For those who can't get out, don't have the resources or fail to make the leap from poverty to adequacy, despair, drugs, escapism of every kind, Fundamentalist religion, mental illness political radicalization and weird sexual bullshit tend to fill in the gap and distract people from their bad quality of life. The Prosperity Gospel false religion is particularly rampant in an under-most-people's-radar sort of way.
Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of low-wage service jobs, especially during the summer tourist season, and a fair number of decent working people actually do them, but especially in the various small cities up there, immigrants and Jamaican seasonal workers have been doing most of those jobs for 25 years. (Enough so that Black and Biracial people are now a visible minority in Northern Michigan.)
And I'm here to tell you, Republicans hate those people (and by extension, love the hard-working Jamaicans with whom they share some values, like homophobia, and who don't vote in this country) or at least they used to.
The shitty old Elks Club motherfuckers that I used to know, used to drink with and play golf (badly) with, they think it's all a big joke and if the rednecks knew what those old country club guys said about them in private...they would never vote Republican again. George W. Bush and even Dick Cheney were the fucking exception. Think Dennis Hastert, Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, The Koch Bros and What Became of Charlton Heston. Well, that was 20 years ago, since then the Tea Party and then Trump came along and the people with all the crazy issues and the weird sexual bullshit are the only ones who are left...well, them and Ted Cruz///and it's like these new ones looked at the shitty old guys I used to know and said to the Universe at large "Hold my beer."
In point of fact, most of those old guys, the ones who are still alive anyway, they're not even Republicans anymore, or they're Never Trump Republicans. Most of them just got left behind somewhere along the way. For one guy that I know, it was the racists coming out of the woodwork. For another it was people like Caitlin Jenner and Milo Yiannopolous. The paths to extinction are many and varied.
If anything, the Tea Party and Trump interlude may well go down as a pleasant interlude before the storm. I'm 100% serious here. This bullshit is getting worse.
The absolute worst tendencies of the old shitty Elks Club motherfuckers are combining with the addiction to relative status of the base, the conspiracy-theory driven bullshit of the Trump years and a bottomless, vast nihilism that only seems to get worse by the day. If it's not stopped, this is going to end with Americans shooting at each other, them first and then the rest of us shooting back in self-defense.
Odds are, as it did after 1/6 the State will act to save itself, and there's simply too many of the rest of us in a lot of places. But, given the balkanization and polarization that Republicans have created it's inevitable that they'll end up with enough assets to set themselves up if they decide to break off a piece of America for themselves...an outcome I've viewed as possible since about 2006 and as increasingly likely since 2015 or so. But for some people the bloodshed, carnage and cruelty will be the point.
So yeah...
They'll have a little fascist banana republic and their base won't care, so long as this person makes ten cents more than that person, and so on ad infinitum...and one has more bananas than the other does. I guarantee you whatever media services they have will endlessly trumpet the immorality of all of us who are on the other side making $15 an hour or whatever and just trying to live our lives
Because in Republican-land, just trying to live your life without the Party or religion (or both) signing off on it is immoral, and how you live has to be approved of as well.
(This is, mind you, not what I was taught and I used to be both a Christian and a Republican.)
And if you won't go along, or you protect yourself from this shit in any way or you end up on the other side of the line? Get used to this kind of bottomless disrespect and hate. These people think you shouldn't get shit in a paper bag when they think you're on their side and increasingly, they'll tell you it right to your face.
A hat shop in Nashville started selling yellow Star of David patches with "Not Vaccinated" on them, sparking accusations of Anti-Semitism and a national backlash. The owner blames everybody but herself for this. Because of course, nothing is ever the shitty old white person's fault.
The Stetson company has apparently severed ties with the hat shop over this bullshit and deservedly so. Trust me, conservatives love that brand. This is absolutely going to leave a mark.
I can't wait for Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz to argue on the Senate Floor that the Cowboy Hat industry should be de-facto nationalized as a result.
And arguing that every single aspect of life should be subordinated to government and religion (but only when its theirs and they have an iron grip on power, otherwise it's Yippee-aye-yay, LIVE FREE OR DIE MOTHERFUCKER!) is exactly what they are doing and will continue to do.
Party of Small Government (TM) my ass. And they're mad because everybody from corporations to common citizens to members of the government and military are doing whatever they can to defend America from this bullshit.
Literally everything these motherfuckers ever said was a lie to cover for the worst aspects of humanity. People like Ronald Reagan, the Bushes, John McCain, etc. they were just part of the cover, camouflage that was discarded when the assholes, the fanatics and the racists felt like they didn't need it anymore.
I mean, I get it, when you can get people to believe that their own employer, a private corporation, raising their own or somebody else's wages due to free market forces in order to remain competitive in a free market system and attract workers in a free society is somehow a bad thing, you really don't have to bother with much in the way of excuses anymore.
Relative status is a hell of a drug. So is Fentanyl, just sayin.'
The only true thing some of those old Republicans ever said was that they hated their voters.
Thing is, some of those voters sign up to be hated, because that's what they think life is.
If we want to remain a free society where one can choose such things as where they work and go somewhere else if it's not enough, we're going to have to address this issue.
If we want a better country, we do indeed have to be better citizens.
When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything. ~Umberto Eco
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