A change is gonna come
When the pope puts on his Easter whites and talks about universal basic income, we are in a new world. Change will come slowly, but everyone living through this will remember.
The American Federation of Teachers is airing an ad about nurses who are risking and sometimes losing their lives, only to be accused of theft. ("Where are the masks going? Are they going out the back door?") As they struggle to keep people alive and worry about carrying infection home to their own families, their accuser thinks of new ways to make everything worse, from defunding WHO to holding up relief checks until his name can be printed on them.
In recent years, public school teachers have had to strike for a living wage, while critics call them lazy (those long summer vacations) and complain about creeping multiculturalism, and the Secretary of Education pushes schemes to privatize all the schools and replace science with Genesis. Now parents are having to wrangle children at home and even get them to pay attention to online lessons. It doesn't look so soft now, does it? And you probably don't have thirty to forty kids at the dining room table, or a principal nagging about paperwork.
Then there are the people we never think of unless they go on strike. More than fifty New York City transit workers, for example, have died from coronavirus, and the numbers in other cities are comparable. At least they have an effective union, and New York promises a $500,000 benefit to their families. The people who deliver the supplies to supermarkets and stock the shelves can't expect their employers to be as generous -- especially Whole Foods, which is not providing them with protective gear. Its owner, Jeff Bezos, could cough up, so to speak, as he has grown even more staggeringly rich off this disaster. Police, EMTs, firefighters, postal workers, sanitation workers, railroad workers, the people who keep the lights on and the sewage treatment plants running, still on the job. Next time someone rants about the Deep State, ask them who processed your unemployment claim and tallied your mail-in ballot.
Applaud them at dusk, throw them a parade, give them Red Sox tickets for life. All fine, but remember everybody needs to live as good a life as the hedge-fund managers, telephone sanitizers, writers of advertising copy and other useless eaters. I use the Nazis' term deliberately, because Trump has decided this is his Reichstag fire: he wants to dismiss both chambers of Congress because Moscow Mitch's Senate won't confirm his appointments, and not because the Speaker is opposing his lunatic scheme to de-fund WHO in the middle of a pandemic. But that's for another day.
The American Federation of Teachers is airing an ad about nurses who are risking and sometimes losing their lives, only to be accused of theft. ("Where are the masks going? Are they going out the back door?") As they struggle to keep people alive and worry about carrying infection home to their own families, their accuser thinks of new ways to make everything worse, from defunding WHO to holding up relief checks until his name can be printed on them.
In recent years, public school teachers have had to strike for a living wage, while critics call them lazy (those long summer vacations) and complain about creeping multiculturalism, and the Secretary of Education pushes schemes to privatize all the schools and replace science with Genesis. Now parents are having to wrangle children at home and even get them to pay attention to online lessons. It doesn't look so soft now, does it? And you probably don't have thirty to forty kids at the dining room table, or a principal nagging about paperwork.
Then there are the people we never think of unless they go on strike. More than fifty New York City transit workers, for example, have died from coronavirus, and the numbers in other cities are comparable. At least they have an effective union, and New York promises a $500,000 benefit to their families. The people who deliver the supplies to supermarkets and stock the shelves can't expect their employers to be as generous -- especially Whole Foods, which is not providing them with protective gear. Its owner, Jeff Bezos, could cough up, so to speak, as he has grown even more staggeringly rich off this disaster. Police, EMTs, firefighters, postal workers, sanitation workers, railroad workers, the people who keep the lights on and the sewage treatment plants running, still on the job. Next time someone rants about the Deep State, ask them who processed your unemployment claim and tallied your mail-in ballot.
Applaud them at dusk, throw them a parade, give them Red Sox tickets for life. All fine, but remember everybody needs to live as good a life as the hedge-fund managers, telephone sanitizers, writers of advertising copy and other useless eaters. I use the Nazis' term deliberately, because Trump has decided this is his Reichstag fire: he wants to dismiss both chambers of Congress because Moscow Mitch's Senate won't confirm his appointments, and not because the Speaker is opposing his lunatic scheme to de-fund WHO in the middle of a pandemic. But that's for another day.
posted by Buttermilk Sky at 5:14 PM
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