Scab!
There is this type of worker they call a scab. These are workers that offer to work in the vacancy left over from striking workers. Naturally they aren’t liked by regular unionized workers because they hurt the union’s bargaining power and drive down wages.
Something similar happens with high status people who ignore low status people. If a high status person were to engage a low status person like they were a human it would send a message that lifestyles besides working yourself into the ground were OK. But very few people would work themselves into the ground if our culture decoupled your worth as a person from how much money and status you had.
The Sunglasses Con
You are in a city with crowded sidewalks. A guy in a crowd bumps up against you and his sunglasses fall off and shatter on the ground. He accuses you of running in to him and breaking them and then says they were $150 Oakleys and demands you pay him $150 to replace them. You aren’t buying it. At this point he asks for $125 and then his price keeps coming down and down. The point here is while you might not have been sure it was a con initially, it is glaringly obvious now.
The moral of the story is YOU are the sunglasses. You don’t realize you’re worthless right away after being broken but after awhile it begins to dawn on you. And as it does (and as you descend lower and lower) society’s lies about you being worth something are expressed in an increasingly ridiculous fashion, and eventually stop altogether.
reach out!
As you well know I feel like all of us the rest of the way down are programmed by the winners. One way we are is the way we lionize being vulnerable and reaching out to people when we are in need. The winners generally have built up a good enough social network (a cause as well as an effect of winning) that when they reach out they usually don’t get burned. But the further down you go the more vulnerability is met with indifference or scorn, but we’re programmed by the winners to be vulnerable and we can’t help it!
Hope Poor
Hope isn’t some kind of unlimited resource one can just tap into at will (it’s marketed that way, but you will eventually see through the ad copy). Hope works more like a credit card. It gives you premature (and often badly needed) sustenance. The catch is that you are are borrowing against the thing hoped for. If the thing hoped for disappears, you are hit with an overdraft of despair.
Hope becomes a predatory lender for those who have very little of it to begin with. Just as the poor get the worst terms when borrowing money, those with little hope generally do poorly with the hope they do have. The hope-poor have two things going against them.
- The actors and situations in the lives of the hope-poor (not surprisingly) are not not conducive to putting one’s hope in
- The hope-poor are extremely vulnerable. The little hope they do have is of extreme value to them. When it gets shattered the consequences can be terrible. This is why many with little hope claim they are hopeless because not spending their hope is often the wisest thing one could do given their circumstances (the catch here is often hope works behind your back–you unconsiously put your hope in someone or something)
poem
How to Love My Anxiety [poem]
Pay
Here is an email I wrote to a company that discriminated against me on the basis of disability. I was fully qualified for the job but did not get it. They kept the position open awhile after so I know they didn’t find someone better.
You may or may not remember me but I applied for a job at your shop in ’08 and was not hired. At the time I thought it was disability discrimination, now I’m not as sure, but the whole process of being fully qualified for a job and not getting it hurt and demoralized me so much that, after another year and a half of unsuccessful interviews, I gave up and went on disability.
All this to say you pay an individual with a disability either way. You hire them and get an honest day’s work from them or you don’t and your taxes go to keeping them on the dole. I have cost the government ~$20k in payments and ~$32k in insurance expenses. I’m not particularly proud of this either–I’d rather build a life in a way that would elicit respect from my fellow man.
You guys do good work and I’m sure will stay in business for a long time.
I actually still work some but don’t get insurance with my job so to keep my insurance I have to claim I’m disabled.
put down
My cat is set to be put down today at three in the afternoon.
It is strange to me that humans can’t just go somewhere to be put down if they can’t find a job. We see the unemployed being put down against their will in the T4 program Hitler started. But in most other cases people are forced to live without a job, even if they don’t want to. The ending of one’s life is out of one’s own hands either way.
Advent Prayer
My dad is a pastor. Here is an advent prayer he did last December.
As we begin our time of Advent this year, Lord, we acknowledge that we, and our neighbors, long for You. OK, some among us do not yet believe you exist. But most all of us, in our “seeing” moments, realize that we are “stuck up in here!” We need a way out. We need rescue. Frankly, we could use a Savior.
How stuck are we? Some of our community are stuck in jail, some are stuck in depression or addiction, some are stuck on what could have been – would have been – should have been. Some wonder why on earth their loved one died.
Some of us are stuck on our facebook page, some on our financial situation, some are wondering if anyone likes them.
We need You to pull us out, Lord – to save us – to begin painting new pictures next to and over our old ones. We need You to help us see what it is that we are actually looking at… actually Looking for…
In Your name we ask for help, Jesus.
Open the eyes of our hearts.
…
My cat is dying. When he wasn’t dying I used to pet him and joke about how he was going to kitty hell where there would be dogs, water, and tin foil. And he’d see Emily our other cat who was already there. Now that he’s dying it’s different. He is going to cease to exist just like I and everyone will someday. I think we have this unspoken belief that tears have magical properties that can make things real (like in the Velveteen Rabbit). If our heart is wrenched enough by death then the potency of the emotion tells us there must be something beyond the grave.
already dead
For awhile in late 2012 I thought I had already killed myself, I was already dead, everything I was experiencing was just a hallucination in some kind of bizarre afterlife. Part of the reason I believed this is people were acting just the way I would predict them to act so I stopped thinking of them as people and started thinking them of projections. I believe that call this Cotard’s Syndrome and it’s a certifiable mental illness. The interesting thing is the treatment is just doubling down on the anti psychotics I’m already on. These anti psychotics basically shut down the lucid part of yourself (especially in higher doses). So treatment for someone who believes they are dead is killing the off-the-rails lucidity that helped create this idea. In a way zombifying them, but making them dead in a way that is acceptable to society.