Seen But Not Heard

The term, “Children should be seen and not heard” is something that I was told frequently as a child. Many times, when I entered a room where people would be conversing about who knows what, this was said to me if I tried to participate in the conversation. Oddly enough, it was never my parents who said this to me. It was always my older sister, though my mother never contradicted her. I only had to be told this a few times before I stopped trying to engage in their socializing.

My sister was always snotty and condescending in her interactions with me and that didn’t stop until she got married. After that, she mellowed a bit, but not much. She told me once after we had both become adults that she was sorry that she had been so hateful to me when we were growing up. She cried as she admitted that she failed at being the “big sister” and how she could have and should have been kinder and more supportive, and as the older sibling she should have been there for me and been more caring. It is a fact that she never was but as a child I just saw it as normal behavior on her part. She was a mean-spirited person and that was just the sister card that I drew, but that didn’t make her cruelty hurt any less. I truly did not know what to say to her after her admitting that she was unkind, but it seemed to me that her admission was pretty irrelevant by then. I responded by brushing it off somewhat and chalking it up to kids will be kids, but mostly I just wondered “what the hell brought this on?”

Actor, Ian McKellen said in an interview once that his older sister was the same way, refusing to let him play with her and her friends and hurting his feelings constantly when they were children. He said that he forgave her and she grew up to be a lovely person. That is wonderful, but this was not the case for my sister. She became tolerable - if I didn’t have to be around her very much. So, I wasn’t.

This is the way that I used to feel about politics and social injustice. As long as I could stay out of the fallout from political and social inequality, I did. It is what it is, was the view I tried to take on it. Even though I experienced more than my share of abuse, misogyny, and unfair treatment, I worked around it as there was little else that I thought I could do. It was less troubling than trying to analyze the why of it, but when I began to see people in politics and local government that I knew gain power and authority and use that power to disenfranchise those least capable of fighting the tyranny I began to see things differently. Few things get your attention as quickly as working with the poor and being the poor, and I did both. It was around this time that the Universe came calling with influences that were too compelling to ignore as well.

It is much too easy to believe that charities will solve the problems that exist in this country. Former President George W. Bush tried to start a movement toward expecting churches and charities to take care of the needs of the people and therefore shift the responsibility of rampant poverty away from the government being obliged to do something about it. This was very popular in many states who quickly started dropping or cutting existing help programs for the people. To this day, many of those programs have not been reinstated and many more have been lost since then. What these lame-brains don’t “get” is that charitable giving cannot “fix” a problem that is rooted in a society that sets us up to fail so that capitalism can prevail at every turn, as profit is always the bottom line with “big sister”. It is designed to lift them up as they keep us down. It isn’t an accident that poverty exists. It is intentionally built in to the system. They cannot maintain their exalted status without taking us to the cleaners.

I saw recently that billionaire Jeff Bezos gave singer Dolly Parton 100 million dollars in recognition of her charitable work. What Ms. Parton has done as a philanthropist is definitely worthy of noting, but I am appalled that a billionaire would give money to a millionaire when Mr. Bezos could never be bothered to recognize the efforts of thousands of Amazon employees who once worked for him and made it possible for him to become a multi-billionaire, while they received inadequate salaries, intolerable working conditions, few if any Covid protections, and many were fired or penalized for daring to try to unionize. Charitable giving sounds very admirable on the surface, but deduct the salaries and administrative costs for operating said charities from the amount given to them and see how much of the money actually goes to the cause. Then realize how much of a tax deduction the donors receive for their generosity. Who really wins here? Not the Amazon workers or anyone else in this country who must survive on substandard wages which are considered acceptable by far too many people. 100 million dollars could make a substantial difference in the lives of a great many people if it was distributed to the citizens fairly. Charity would not be necessary in a world where classism and favoritism did not exist.

For all the things that our government does that never solve the problems of poverty and inequality, they aren’t responsible for how employers treat the people who work for them or how unequally resources are distributed and sold to consumers. They are however, complicit in perpetuating the problems.

Just like my Mother never stopped my sister from bullying me. She would just sit there and allow her to exclude and belittle me, and wouldn’t make eye contact with me while it was happening. This is how our government reacts. They can see the effects of not paying a living wage and ignoring the difficulties of the people but they do not intervene to stop it. So, the “big sister” employers continue to bully and abuse the “little sister” employees as long as the “parent” government says by saying nothing that it is acceptable to be this way. So many things are learned by the employees when they are treated as underlings and 50% of it results in depressed, burned out, and defeated workers with the other 50% becoming angry and aggressive toward everyone except the very people who are responsible for the injustice. We are a culture that admires and aspires to be like the wealthy capitalists who gorge themselves on what little resources that the people have. Anytime that people can manage to elevate their status to a higher level they many times forget where they came from and are just so proud of their achievements that they never look back because this proves that they have always been worthy of their new status, and the people who never get there just don’t deserve it.

Giving back to the processes that have helped us achieve a better situation should be as normal as breathing when you understand that no one makes it to the top by themselves. I believe that this is the place where Dolly Parton’s charitable giving comes from and I commend her for that, but being that she is a wealthy person now, I find it difficult to believe that she needs a benefactor like Jeff Bezos to continue doing what she does. The biggest kindness that anyone can do is to raise the standard of living for all of us with a living wage, healthcare for everyone, and a fair say in what happens in our world. Little can be done by a society that lives from hand to mouth and lives in fear of never having enough to get by on. We have been seen but are not being heard as to what will resolve the multitude of problems that we have. It is extremely easy to dismiss us as just unworthy because God didn’t see fit to bless us like he blessed them. We didn’t choose a lucrative career path or we just aren’t smart enough to do the jobs that garner a higher income. There are hundreds of excuses for why we are just unfortunate people but the only true reasons are greed and elitism, which are actually glorified and admired traits by many.

Our “big sister” capitalist employers are rarely held accountable for their crimes and abuses of the people. Our “parent” government refuses to be bothered with the system that never stops being thoughtless and lacking in empathy. Why should they? Toughen up “little sisters” because we have earned the right to lord over you by virtue of our superior status. You will be “seen” as a resource and nothing more. You will not be “heard” because your protestations of unfair treatment are irrelevant.  Breaking this cycle is possible if the “parent” government calls a halt to it, but few of them are inclined to do so.

Trickledown economics does not work. They know this already but they feel no responsibility for changing the prevailing warped mentality that exists in the world. Too many of us also feel that they are probably right about us not deserving better.

“Big sister” may grow up and learn to do better if there are enough voices out there to reveal the real cost to society as a whole when dis-ease and a simmering resentment toward them breeds a breakdown in the culture that has had a devastating effect on everyone. An apology down the road means little when the basic behavior stays the same. Crime, hate, loss of respect for others, and a perpetuation of egotistical and status seeking behavior that we see in profit driven pseudo role models becomes the norm in all areas of society. A set of values that disregards people as being people has evolved into what we are reaping on a massive scale right now in this country. This is the legacy of a “Me First!” country and family dynamic.

The United States is very much like a highly dysfunctional family that has many secrets, faults, and delusions which they continuously sweep under the rug and blame others for the fact that the rug is now too lumpy to walk on. We have arrived at this point in time by them being too arrogant and guilty of ludicrous choices to backtrack and repair the damage. The children must lead us out of this because the representative parents and the older siblings will not budge if we don’t make some noise and barge into the room with a determination to be heard. Many times, it truly is a child that can lead to a truth that was unnoticed before. The child may be an adult now but when people are used to not listening to them it is often necessary to cause a commotion to get attention. The hard part is getting a seat at the table with the big people. You won’t get an invitation but you have the power to be heard on social media and many other forums that were never available to the generations that came before you. To assume that your expressions have no worth in the eyes of the ruling class is an easy assumption to make but remember that they have made some major screw ups from where they sit right now that look pretty damn dumb to the rest of us. Ridiculous statements and insane comments have come out of their mouths on national television. To say nothing gets you nothing because it will be assumed that you either agree with what they have given us or you agree with their assessment that you have no right to be heard.

Say something. Give them a shake up, because you are very tired of the shake down that they keep giving to you.

On one occasion when my sister was spouting off to me I unexpectedly pushed over the chair that she was sitting in and she slammed into the wall. I got reprimanded severely for it by my parents but it was worth getting in to trouble for because the shocked look on her face when she hit the wall was priceless. She picked her battles a little more carefully with me after that and I felt a little more empowered after showing her that I had a limit to how much crap I would take from her. We have never really been able to become friends in this life but I have never felt guilt or regret about that. It was a necessary break from a dysfunctional relationship. She had to go, and so does Capitalism.