Essential Workers

All too often, it takes a crisis to cut through the socialized propaganda that we consider reality and help us better understand the actual reality in which we are living.

For example, in the US we had an understanding of our safety and security, built up by years of educational and media propaganda, prior to 9/11 that was drastically altered by 9/11. Reality itself didn’t change. We were not less safe on 9/12 than we were on 9/10. But the event shook loose some of the built up layers of our misunderstanding of reality.

So, with COVID-19, have the false fortifications of who and what is important for our functioning society and economy been shaken and dislodged. The term Essential Workers has grown from being rarely heard outside of the disaster response field to being ubiquitous. and our understanding of who is essential has undergone a significant transformation.

This should move us to a concerted examination of how we fulfill our needs in a modern society and an explosion of assessment, criticism, and the rise of alternative structures and methods of organization in order to fulfill our needs. But the existing system has such an inherent powerful capacity to resist change, that this will happen, as usual, only on the margins.

But what has broken past those margins, thanks to the crisis, is a truer understanding of who are the essential workers in our economy.

Humans need food, clothing, and shelter as the most basic needs to survive, and, of course, much more than that to sustain us socially and intellectually, but we will start with the basics. Who provides these things in a modern society? The capitalist myth that is part of the great facade cracked by the Covid-19 crisis is that we each provide these things for ourselves. Through the falsehood described often as rugged individualism, we individually procure the means (money) of obtaining our basic needs through the market. The market, the propaganda continues, is built upon the principles of fairness and competition. This is bullshit.

Every type of economy is an interdependent series of cooperative interactions. Some roles in each economy are more essential for the fulfillment of basic human needs than others. So, we have learned a bit better that the food producers, food preparers, and food transporters are among the most important, or most essential workers in our modern society. These are things that the vast majority of people no longer do for themselves and, as such, are fully reliant on other people’s work in order to survive. Having peeked behind the facade, we now see and cannot unsee (though the propaganda will continue to resist acknowledging the reality) that farmers and fieldworkers, food processors and transporters, and people working at the point of sale, be it grocery stores, convenience stores, restaurants or online, are essential workers. They cannot stop their work without the great risk of many people suffering. This understanding is a breakthrough. These workers, commonly among the least well compensated and most marginalized, are as important to the function of society as the workers who provide and maintain water, electricity, and communications infrastructure.

It is long past time we recognize this essential work and compensate it accordingly.

People Are Revolting

I have a daily podcast called People Are Revolting.

I started People Are Revolting to amplify the hundreds of stories of everyday people who stand up for or against what is happening in their neighborhood, their town, their ecology, their nation and their world.

The podcast reflects my own opinions only in the curation of what I include and what I exclude. Why are people revolting? The Why matters. The goals matter. The underlying beliefs of the people revolting matter.

I intentionally chose the title People are Revolting for its double meaning. It is a fun phrase because it tweaks the language in a way that makes you think. It is not my original thought. It came from the title of a Jim Hightower album from 1995: The People are Revolting (In the Very Best Sense of That Word). Like the title, the content of the podcast is not original. The words are seldom ever mine, I rarely even comment beyond the news story I am sharing on each episode. But the twist in the title is important. Are good people revolting? Are good people opposing revolting people. Are revolting people revolting?

It is not only good people that are standing up and fighting back against the harms to their life or the lives of others. But it is those stories that I seek out and retell.

Often, Revolting people Revolt. I don’t tell those stories. The opinions of the protesters that fight to uphold and extend White Supremacy should not be amplified. They are among those lighting the world on fire and stoking the inferno. They are making the world a more hostile and unlivable place for others. Ensuring that some people and communities do not have the opportunity to be successful and live fulfilled lives.

While I find that one useful tactic for resisting those that choose to spread division and hatred is to ignore them, to deny them an audience, to suppress the spread of their ideas, that is only one of many tactics that need to be employed and by itself it will fail. Another important tactic is to counter their message with both a direct refutation of their positions and policies and an amplification of alternatives. I hope People Are Revolting serves to amplify the alternatives through the stories and words of people taking action

Our Social, Economic and Political structures have been designed to resist our efforts to change them for the better, to reshape them into structures that support all individuals or to replace them with ones that do. Our challenge is to devise the right plan to disarm the oppressive elements of these structures and the groups and individuals that support them, and to effectively deploy the right tactics and methods to fulfill that plan.

Ultimately, we need to deprive the individuals and groups who want to uphold unfair and harmful systems of support, of audience, of trust.

Often, those fighting to uphold oppression have identified real issues in peoples lives but have chosen harmful solutions and resistance to change as their coping mechanism. As such they are supporting the status quo and are reinforcing the systems already resistant to improvement. This is a great advantage they have on their side.

We need to make it clear to the widest audience possible that their solutions are harmful and that better solutions are available. This is an enormous task. One that we must dedicate our lives to if we hope to shift the momentum.

Our broad goals must be

• To expose oppressive systems

• To propose, build, and promote better alternatives

• To discredit and oppose harmful changes that claim to offer solutions

Our tactics must be open and flexible and considered carefully for each fight. We need to make sure the tactics used do not compromise the goals of the change we seek. It is not enough to replace one oppressive system of control with another. There are no benevolent dictators. Violence has the greatest potential of disrupting a transition to a better, more equitable world. In almost all cases it should be avoided as it will decrease the chances of a better outcome. In very narrow circumstances in which people are faced with violence every day, violence may be a necessary part of the resistance.

Our goal on this planet is not to arm the defenseless but to disarm the violent, through strategy, not force.

If We Had a Justice System

I am outraged.

I am disappointed.

What I am not, and have not been for a very long time, is surprised.

We don’t have a Justice System in the US, we have a legal system.

If we had a Justice System police would face charges for killing unarmed and non-threatening individuals.

If we had a Justice System police would face charges for killing a bystander.

If we had a Justice System police wouldn’t smash in the door of someone’s home in the middle of the night to serve a search warrant for drugs. If we had a Justice System there would be no search warrants for drugs.

If we had a Justice System the courts would prosecute not only the officer that failed to shoot Breonna Taylor, but also the officer that shot her, and the officer that killed her. And the officer that sent them there.

But, we don’t have a Justice System in the US we have a Legal System. And Black people, other People of Color, and Poor People of all races and backgrounds are more often crushed by it than they are served by it.

In one sense our Legal System is broken, but, more appallingly, it is working exactly as it is designed. The Legal System is designed to support and defend the wealthy and their property and in the US the wealthy and the property owners are mostly white. And thus, the US Legal System is a pillar of white supremacy and , as it stands, needs to be abolished.

For Breonna Taylor.

…and for so many others

The Lesser Asshole

When your primary tactic is to berate and shame people into voting for your candidate, you undoubtably have a lousy candidate.

When you ramp up the same tactics that you indignantly claimed were disqualifying when used by supporters of another candidate, namely, attacking and smearing anyone who is not praising your chosen one, your politics are bankrupt.

The language that real champions of the poor and marginalized refined to define and reveal the subtle (or not so subtle) actions and inactions that keep the poor and marginalized poor and marginalized has once again been coopted by the wealthy and powerful. “Privilege,” is now being used by the privileged to attack the privileged for acting privileged.

I am enormously privileged.

I have the privilege of being a member of the race that committed multiple genocides in what would become the United States, not a member of the races of the victims of these genocides.

I have the privilege of identifying as, and being identified as, a member of the dominant gender in the social structures developed in the United States. The gender that has always created and enforced the rules that others are made to live by.

I have the privilege of being born in a rural town gentrified into a desirable suburb to the nearest big city thanks to those socialist highways and marginal public transit.

I have the privilege of growing up in a time when there were good blue-collar jobs available that could generate enough income to support a family of five and that my father had one of those jobs and I had a comfortable, middle class childhood.

I have the privilege of getting a good job with a good company that has decent benefits including health insurance.

I am undoubtedly more privileged than most people.

I am more privileged than the people that are stuck in grossly segregated and underfunded and underperforming public schools that your candidate fought to keep there rather than allow them to be bussed to better schools.

I am more privileged than the people, disproportionally people of color, that your candidate facilitated the imprisonment of with his Crime Bill.

I am more privileged than the majority of the Afghanis, Iraqis, Sudanese, Libyans, Syrians, Pakistanis and countless other nationalities that your candidate incinerated in wars and “actions” and assassinations. The dead and the disfigured and the destitute that lost their livelihoods, their limbs, their lives.

I am more privileged than the tens of thousands of Americans that die annually because they lack health care. Tens of thousands of dead Americans that could not afford health care, because your candidate cares more about maintaining private insurance profits at the expense of those lives. Even with all of my privilege I understand full well the power of the private insurance industry to destroy lives. My “good” insurance stopped paying for my medication a few years ago sending me into a long declining health spiral that landed me disabled for 6 months, largely bedridden. Privilege isn’t everything when someone’s profits are on the line.

I am more privileged than the tens of thousands sent back to their countries of origin by your candidate. Back to poverty, back to harassment, back to brutality, back to death. Simply because they lacked the privilege of being born on the right side of an imaginary line.

I am more privileged than the numerous women whose personal space or intimate privacy your candidate has violated. I have the privilege of not fitting the profile of the people your candidate chooses to victimize, though in this case especially, it is not my privilege that matters, but your candidate’s privilege. His privilege to victimize and not be confronted or challenged or diminished by his actions. His privilege to be believed because of his race, gender, wealth, job, social status.

Of what use is any of my privilege if I don’t use it to stand up to the privilege of your candidate and against the horrible things he perpetrated.

It does not matter to me that he is the lesser asshole.

The privilege to vote, a privilege that many have fought for and died for, and for which many others continue to do so, is a privilege I take seriously. I promised myself when I turned 18 that I would never hold my nose and vote.

If you nominate an asshole, I will not vote for him.

But you won’t care. Because you are acting like my choice to vote for a better candidate is a more horrifying action than a sexual assault, or a racist legal system, or a murdered Iraqi child.