“We were never holding back, worried that, time would come to an end.”

-from the song Being Boring by Pet Shop Boys

In a recent video posted on the YouTube channel Life After Layoff, the series host told a story about people having been hired for a job out of state, quitting their current jobs and moving to another city to start the new position then finding out that the job offer had been rescinded before they were ever able to start work, leaving them high and dry and unemployed with no guilt whatsoever on the part of the employer. For anyone who is seeking a better employment future for their self this is the ultimate horror. In the current job market now, this is probably much more common than we might imagine. It also happens that sometimes you are actually able to take the job but for whatever whim that strikes the fancy of the employer they might terminate your position within a few weeks or a month without giving a damn about the consequences to your life.

Many years ago, actor Bob Hoskins was hired for a role in a major motion picture but before he could start working the producer/director of the film decided to give the role to someone else.  Bob was given an apology and a substantial amount of money anyway for his time and trouble. I wish I could remember the name of the film and its producer because I really think that the way they handled the situation was truly fair and commendable. It should be a law that anyone who gets treated like they have no worth as far as making a living goes must be paid the equivalent of two years salary by the corporate perpetrator who plays games with people’s lives and walks away clean. It is too bad that in today’s world of apathy and no empathy for fellow human beings and the tragedy that is life in the 21st century we could all take a lesson in how decent and honest people handle situations that can make or break a human being as they do their best to navigate this life and try to live the best life that they can.

If you were born in the 20th century you can probably remember people, possibly your parents or grandparents, who had worked at the same place for years and sometimes decades. Many of them were fortunate enough to retire with a pension and a paid for home. This was not a legacy that was passed on to later generations. My daughter told me recently that she cannot remember any time in her life when the kind of troubles that we have now didn’t exist. Certainly what we have now is worse but she is correct about things being in a constant state of turmoil and fear since the beginning of this century. We cannot be sure from one day to the next what kind of fresh hell is going to hit us in the morning and the people in this country are extremely divided on why this is so and how to fix it. There is a category of people who are hell bent on destroying any possibility for security and stability for the majority of us. On the other side there are the rest of us who keep trying to duck and dodge our way through the mind-boggling deluge of hate and disregard for whether or not we live or die while they set about destroying our security and wellbeing one piece at a time every single day. Just like the lyrics from the song written above there was actually a time when we felt reasonably sure that we didn’t have to constantly fear for our very lives. We did have “time to find for ourselves” and we weren’t “worried that time would come to an end” because we were not in a position of constant terror like we are now. Most people were truly not thinking that they wouldn’t be able to have a job or a career at some point. It just did not occur to them that they could not or would not be able to work and sustain themselves somehow. Jobs may not have been easy to find but they were out there. We just needed to prepare with an education. There were many of us who saw this coming in the 1990s but we were in no position to stop it. Those who had the power to stop it were the very people who were creating it, so we had to watch the downfall as it came and try as we might to save our children from it as we entered the 21st century we were not able to.

Human behavior has changed so much in the last two decades that I find myself looking back and remembering when it was actually possible to “rely on a friend” but as I look around, I realize that most of the people that I could rely on are gone. They have moved away or died. Is this why things have gotten so terrible? Is it because the people who knew how to care don’t exist in my world anymore or is it that the traits of caring people have been unlearned and are evolving out of the culture? If the latter is true, I can tell you that there is no hope for us without a deadly civil war brought about by those of us who still remember a better way. What a tragedy. I see and hear experts walking carefully around the promotion of taking to the streets to begin that war but there is no denying that they are tailoring their speech to say that this is all that we have left to us if we are ever going to come out of these deadly times and bring forth a world where we can believe that our time won’t come to an end while we try to prevent the inevitability of it.

When you cannot trust that you will have employment to sustain you or income of any kind be it from working or from the benevolence of a government that understands that everyone must have a way to take care of themselves properly you are just a few baby steps away from annihilation.  When you cannot trust that you will have a decent place to live or clean water or something to eat or a way to sustain your health there is nothing left to keep you living for much longer. I keep hearing that we have no other recourse for this other than a situation like the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution. That says to me that our days are truly numbered because a great many of us are not capable of living through such a thing. What can we do while the battle is raging? You only need to look to the east of us to see our future. How are those who are engaged in these kinds of wars right now holding up even as the whole world takes to the streets and condemns what is happening? There is no benevolent and prosperous United States to escape to now as there was during World War II. Life will only be as good as we are able to make it by relearning the basic human traits of civility and hard work as the basis for having and keeping a safer place to live. If we don’t re-learn that and do it damn fast we won’t have the luxury of looking back and declaring that “we were never being boring” because we sure as hell won’t be able to remember a time when we weren’t worried to high heaven that our “time would come to an end”. “Feeling boring” is the least of our problems. Feeling singled out for extinction is problem number one.

And Who Will Save Greece?

A few months ago, I wrote on this blog about Inishbiggle Island off the coast of Ireland and how the Irish government refuses to help the few remaining residents there who are struggling and not winning the battle to save their home. I asked why the people who speak every day about how only Socialism can save the planet now are not stepping up to save a place that could survive if they would turn their attention away from talking about what needs to be done and actually doing it. Inishbiggle is a small place, but it is not without some resources to try to jumpstart itself again. I have to assume that the reason no one will help them try to start again is because the only people who could help are Capitalists and they are unwilling to lift a finger without an assurance that they would make large profits for themselves in the doing. I look around here in America and in other countries such as Greece and I see and hear about how they are also teetering on the brink of collapse, with thousands of their citizens leaving the countries by the day. Are we not long for the end of our perceived paradise homes as well? It seems as though no one who could change things has any desire to do so as they have pretty much tapped out all of their sources that could produce more wealth for them, so they seem content to sit on their assets in their arrogance and look for new opportunities to acquire profit by seeking to steal it from their people and other countries instead of picking up the pieces of their collapsing houses and refurbishing what is already there. But that is not the capitalist way of doing things.

Journalist David Brooks of the New York Times said (reluctantly and halfheartedly) last year that society made a great error in assuming that manufacturing was no longer the way to a brighter future for Americans. He, and far too many others, projected that what we really needed here was more intellectuals and technology experts to create a great and prosperous future for ourselves. As a result, everyone was encouraged to go to college and pursue “thinking” careers instead of manufacturing and industrial ones. After several decades of doing just that we find ourselves in deep financial insecurity across the board when we realize that we have lost too many of the very things that built this country. There are not enough skilled people to maintain our infrastructure and keep and maintain a thriving middle class. Nobody wants to do these “crap jobs” as they are called anymore. Supposedly, the only people who are willing to work in agriculture, construction, and other “crap jobs” are immigrants, and we don’t want them here. If we ever allowed them to better themselves, they would also want to escape from low wage and dead-end jobs and go to college to become thinkers and talkers, too. We were pushed into believing that maintaining a balanced society was for someone else to do. It worked. We believed it. And now we have thousands of people here who are overburdened with college debt and an inability to find a job that pays them enough to give them a decent standard of living or they cannot find a job at all. It is helpful that David Brooks came to realize that our elitist thinking helped to create the terrible situation that we find ourselves in now, but if he proffered a real solution for how we can get ourselves out of this situation I did not see it.

Before I began writing this essay I went back and revisited a post that I wrote in 2015 called “An Open Letter To Greece." I am sure that if there were any politicians or economists who happened to see this post they were probably thinking “Who the hell is this woman, and how could she be so crazy as to believe that any of this is possible in the real world?”  It is now 10 years later and I honestly do not believe that anything I suggested in that letter was any more ridiculous than what I have been seeing out of politicians and the ruling classes over the past decade when you consider that the actions that they actually took to address their problems did not do a hill of beans good as they still have the same problems that are now coupled with more debt and the loss of thousands of their citizens who are leaving the country in droves. Believe me, America has been no better at fixing their problems either, but several wrongs do not make a right anywhere, and the people are so much worse off now that I don’t even know if handing them a farm in the Australian Outback for $1.00 would make a difference today.

In the aftermath of WW2 most of Europe was nearly destroyed. How to build back up from that had to look like a most daunting task. Germany had to take a hard look at itself and own up to how badly their actions had devastated so much. They actually did take a hard look. The Nuremberg Trials were proof of that. A great many people were held accountable for their actions. It is my understanding that they also did not try to whitewash what they did like many other countries have done. Their schools taught later generations the truth of what happened and Germany was rebuilt and rethought as to how they would not make the same mistakes again. That absolutely may not be the way things are there now, but back in the 20th century there was an admirable effort on their part to do better and live in peace. And it appeared that the rest of the world supported their efforts.

So, when I hear now that Greece cannot (or will not) take the necessary steps to backtrack and assess what has kept them on the edge of a cliff for far too long, I cannot help but wonder why they, and yes, everyone else who is pretty much in the same sinking boat, still refuse to look back and then look ahead to how a dose of Socialism might redirect them into a situation with a future. In case they haven’t noticed, there really is no capitalist solution to what they now have. Without elevating the standard of living for the people who do the actual work in this world you will never not be in crisis. At the risk of being called a racist for daring to bring up the film Gone With The Wind, when it depicted a time of slavery and absurd thinking on the part of the American South, I cannot think of a better example of where we are now as a society. After the Civil War ended and the entire South was decimated, Scarlett O’Hara went home to try to pick up the pieces of the family plantation and their lost way of life and she is asked by one of the house servants “Who gonna milk that cow, Miss Scarlett? We is house workers.” Here is the truth of a people who were so preoccupied with their graciousness and grandiosity that they never counted on losing their slaves. The very people who were smart enough and skilled enough to see to it that there was food to eat and their house was clean and well maintained so they could sit around in the parlor and smoke cigars and set the rules for living that everyone else had to abide by could no longer be relied on.  Here we are again. The people who actually knew how to do important things have “run off” or been kicked aside as useless by all of the superior thinkers. How long will it be before we cannot find anyone who knows how to milk a cow, or change a tire, or anything else that requires life skills and the intelligence of how things work and how to maintain them? Not long, I would think. We already have junkyards full of over-priced cars, auto mechanics who are so overwhelmed with work that it can be two or three weeks before you can get an appointment with them to bring your car in for much needed repairs, and landfills that are specifically for non-working electronics because there is a shortage of people who know anything about how to fix them. People know how to use them, but they find that it is faster and more efficient to just discard them rather than wait for some overworked tech person to try to repair them. Not to mention the fact that many things that we rely on daily are part of a “planned obsolescence” theory that wants you to never stop needing to replace them after a short period of time so their profits never stop pouring in.

So, back to my original question, who will save Greece? You might want to look for a Jeffrey Sachs, who helped pull Poland out of their financial crisis in the 1980’s by telling them to ask for debt forgiveness from their creditors, and they actually got it. But you will have to remember that you cannot go back to your capitalist practices once you get straight or you will find yourself back where you were. For any country that finds itself teetering on the brink of collapse like Greece, and like America, and too many others, you might look around to see if you have a “Jeffrey Sachs” available there. Greece does have Yanis Varoufakis, if he still lives there. And America actually has Jeffrey, but I don’t see anyone listening to him except the progressive media and people like me. Pray that it isn’t already too late for us to find some “field hands” who actually know how to do something to set things right. Without them, forget about having any milk to drink when you mindlessly threw the baby and the cow out with the bath water.