“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their current jobs and moving to another city to start the new position then finding out that the job offer had been rescinded before they were ever able to start work, leaving them high and dry and unemployed with no guilt whatsoever on the part of the employer.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.