The Lazy Lazoon

In the 1960s there was a British television series called Fireball XL5 that had a cast of marionettes and is great fun to watch. It is science fiction set in outer space and has many never before heard of alien races that the Fireball crew come in contact with. Some are friendly and some are hostile but there is one race of beings called the Lazoon that are so incredibly docile and unobtrusive that they are darn near extinct from not having the capacity to defend themselves in any way.  One particular Lazoon, named Zoonie, lives with one of the Fireball crew named Venus who is their medical officer. She allows Zoonie free reign in her house and never loses her temper with him even if he messes up situations frequently because he understands next to nothing about their culture and mannerisms. The best he can manage of their language is to say “welcome home” and “full power” and a few other simple phrases. He does require supervision even though he tends to sleep a great deal of the time. He is quite a unique character and would likely be exasperating for some people to tolerate, but he isn’t for Dr. Venus. She understands and trusts him like no one else. I wonder how many of us in real life would be so accommodating?

I was in a Walmart store recently and heard an employee talking to another customer as they and I were at the self-checkouts. She said, “The energy here is really bad. Nobody that works here wants to work here.” It isn’t hard to feel empathy for what she said. The store is always crowded. There are always aggressive people in there. Many people are tired and frustrated about everything from the hot weather, the prices on just about everything having increased since your last visit to the store, the screaming and crying children who are possibly more troubled about having to be there than the adults are, the customers who are oblivious to the fact that they are blocking the aisles with their shopping carts, and the fact that there are sometimes five or more of them in their entourage who are congregating at the end of an aisle talking about their grievances in life and making it very difficult to quickly do your shopping and get the hell out of the store that you don’t want to be in either.

“Times is hard.” Mrs. Lovett sang about in the musical Sweeney Todd. They are very hard and not getting any easier. I could name off about 50 reasons for why that is so, but in this post, I will confine my ranting to just one of them; why people seemingly don’t want to work. I say, seemingly because I don’t believe that this assessment is truly accurate. They have futility confused with laziness.

In a capitalist society it is understood that you will have to do some kind of work or you will die in the gutter pretty quickly. There has never been a time in history when that wasn’t so. In the 20th century there were some people who realized that not everyone was capable of managing a full time job and some accommodations were made to help them sustain life with government assistance. That was truly a blessing. For the rest of us who understood that it was up to us to make it on our own we at least carried into that endeavor a mindset that whatever kind of employment that was available to us would have within it at least an adequate amount of compensation for our labor. I don’t know if that mindset was truly possible for everyone but I am sure that it seemed reasonable to assume that it would be true. There can be no reasonable assumption of that now. In fact, far too many jobs in this country will not pay you enough to even cover housing alone. I cringe every time I hear that there are cities here in America that have rental houses and apartments where the rent is 5 thousand dollars a month and up. Who the hell can pay that much when there is a minimum wage of less that $8.00 an hour in this country? You might get extremely lucky in this world and find yourself a job that pays $50k per year but that will not be the amount that you will actually receive in take-home pay. What you will actually have after taxes and insurance premiums are deducted will be about $32k per year. Divide that by 12 months and you have approximately $2,666.00 per month in actual money. It is ludicrous to think that anyone on the planet can manage to live on that amount when rent can be more than three times that per month. What is even more ludicrous is to think that an employer will give you a salary of 50k per year for any of just about 75% percent of the jobs that are available in this country. You can tell me that people just don’t want to work anymore but the fact is that they know that it isn’t going to do them a hill of beans good to work when receiving a living wage for the work is on the impossible list for far too many of us. They will tell you that you are a lazy slob for not wanting to accept a substandard compensation for your labor but they won’t tell you how you can manage to live in a world that “wants 11 dollar bills and you only got 10” ( from the Bob Dylan song Subterranean Homesick Blues).

 

And now that we have established that the vast majority of Americans are well and truly screwed when it comes to even approaching the ability to adequately sustain themselves here we need to understand that this isn’t our only problem. Many of us also do not have healthcare coverage. Many of us also cannot afford a car. Many of us cannot afford to pay for childcare. And we also do not have free television service which prior to the 1970s most people had if they could afford at least a second hand tv and had access to an outdoor antenna. Watching television used to be one of the most prized pastimes for overtired and overworked people to come home to in the evening. You may think that not being able to watch television has little importance in this world but without a way to tune out how difficult life can be sometimes you cannot reset and recharge the energy that a constant barrage of the bad news and frustration that life hands you every single day takes out of you. There weren’t very many channels to watch back then but there was a multitude of very good and very entertaining shows that the whole family could watch together. You can still watch many of those shows on YouTube today. There were no parental warnings shown before the programs started that told you that there was content in them that was unsuitable for children. Such a world used to exist?!? You bet it did! Ask your grandparents.

One thing that is definitely not free in today’s world is the ability to communicate. You are more than screwed if you don’t have a computer or a smartphone and internet service and WiFi. None of those things are cheap. Multiply the cost of them by the number of people in your family and deduct that from the actual salary that you are getting. You might be able to just break even if you live in a garbage can like Oscar the Grouch from Sesame Street. No utility bills, no car, and…never mind. Oscar probably can’t manage either.

I would really like to see a world where everyone including beings like Zoonie had good homes and people like Venus to see to it that they can live a decent and worthwhile life regardless of their circumstances. That really isn’t too much to ask for from humanity. I never heard anyone tell Venus in Fireball XL5 that she was stupid for taking care of Zoonie. His life mattered as much as anyone’s. We have a cat that we named Zoonie. He is one of a litter of four boys and we love him dearly. One of his brothers is a bit of an efficiency and organization fanatic. He rearranges things in their room all the time but he never gets scrappy with the others if they happen to nudge him out of the way at mealtimes. In cat culture he may be the best at “keeping house” and “keeping the peace” but that does not lessen the contribution that Zoonie and his other two brothers give to their and our lives. Capitalism shouldn’t be a mandatory way of life. Everyone has something good and needed in this world to give. Whether it is Zoonie the Lazoon or Zoonie the cat or any one of us that exist, do not judge them by their strengths and weaknesses and then discount them as useless because they don’t possess the skills to keep someone else wealthy. Like Venus, know that they matter for the mere fact that they are here. And get rid of the word lazy. Every life deserves the best that we can give.  No one has the right to take us for everything that we have or covet a world where we are continuously forced on to the endangered species list for their continued gain.

Just for fun, here is an episode of Fireball XL5.

     

 

Caring for everyone is possible. We just need to strive for making selfishness impossible by setting a better example.

“This means giving up no freedom except the freedom to act irresponsibly.”                          

                    -from the film The Day the Earth Stood Still.

“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.