The Great Refusal

 

I'm far from the first person to comment on how hard it is to hire anyone at the moment.  It's a first in my lifetime, at least, to see "Help Wanted" signs JUST ABOUT EVERYWHERE and hardly any takers.  

The curious thing to me is that this started well before the Covid-19 pandemic.  The first sign was the busy fast food outlet that shut down for good close to where I am sitting, not because of an outbreak of food poisoning or flunking too many Heath Department inspections.  They just ran out of employees.  This was a good 2 years before Covid arrived.

At the same time we have all heard a GREAT DEAL OF RUMBLING about raising the minimum wage.  The cost of living has risen too far for anyone to get by on $7.50 a hour unless they're living rent-free with their parents or something.  That was the minimum for some time before the previous governor raised it to $9.25 per hour, with hikes to match the cost of living so it is now $9.50.  This is about three times the minimum wage when I first started working and here's the thing:  you still can't live on it.

And all this is aside from what employers put some of their working people through, like hiring a teenager for the full minimum wage, then announcing later that "Since you're under 18, we don't have to pay you what we promised.  From now on you're making $5.50/hour.  Sorry!"  Waitstaff at restaurants are STILL making the exact same wage they got when I was a college student in the Eighties, $2.25 per hour, on the pretext that, well, if you wait tables you get tips, so you make money on the side.  Except these days you have to split your tips with the kid who busses the tables, and the hostess, and on and on.  AND tips are now taxable.

And of course, not every day at the cafe is equally busy.  And, of course, not everybody leaves a tip.

Then then came Covid, and almost all of us were locked down for months at a time.  Millions lost their jobs almost overnight.  The government came through for us with the most generous increases in unemployment benefits probably ever, PLUS an eviction moratorium.

And then things started to open up, and...nobody wants a job.  Not if the job pays less than $30/hour.  Well-paid jobs are filling up nicely. With half the country refusing to wear a germ mask or get vaccinated, it's definitely not about the virus.  

Here's an unexpected area where everyone in the country...except the gummint...is on the same page.  We only want to make a living wage, ESPECIALLY if we're doing humiliating, difficult, dirty-fingernails jobs.  You know, like home healthcare aide.  Waiter.  Daycare provider.  School-bus driver.  Assembly-line worker in a cannery or slaughterhouse.  Night-shift worker in a homeless shelter.  The deep-fryer operator at your local fast-food outlet.  Jobs like that.  So it raises the question again:  DO WE NEED TO RAISE THE MINIMUM WAGE?  This is a daunting task that can take YEARS of controversy, negotiation and sometimes a literal Act of Congress...

So here's what we're doing.  WE'RE RAISING THE MINIMUM WAGE OURSELVES via good old-fashioned passive resistance.  Workplaces are starting to get some applicants by reposting their open positions and OFFERING ENOUGH MONEY TO LIVE ON.   It's not enough yet, but the rising tide is starting to lift all the boats we hear about in that old saying.

  IF THE BUREAUCRACY CAN'T HELP US, 

WE CAN HELP OURSELVES.

THE TRIAL OF THE CATONSVILLE NINE

 

I HARDLY KNOW WHERE TO START WITH THIS BOOK!  It's just PACKED TO THE GILLS with meditations on Chaos and Order and the way they blend at the edges...

First off, this is a true story taking place in a courtroom.  The author -- who was one of the defendants in this case -- recorded this memoir in the form of a play,  which is MORE THAN FITTING because what is a trial, after all, but a theatrical presentation?  The public is the audience and the jury, I guess, is a panel of critics who GONG THE LOSERS.  

(If you don't know what I mean by 'GONG' you need to find some old video of a now-defunct television program called THE GONG SHOW.  All will be explained.)

The play -- authored by Daniel Berrigan and published under ISBN 0-8232-2330-2 --  takes us back to the chaos emanating from, and surrounding, the Vietnam War.  The Catonsville Nine was a group of Catholic War protestors, including a priest or two, who felt that allowing the war to go on would be a gross violation of everything Jesus Christ stood for.  And everything the Nine stood for.  

(Nobody ever commented anywhere about the OPPOSING VIEWPOINT, held by MILLIONS, that Jesus stood firmly against communism and would have been in favor of this war.  If that had ever been brought up the book would have been MUCH, MUCH LONGER.)

There was almost no discussion of the evidence against the Nine.  They cheerfully admitted making a batch of gasoline jelly, walking into the Catonsville Selective Service office, taking the 1A files outside and NAPALMING them, so the teenaged boys represented in those files would not, themselves, die in the napalm holocaust that was the Vietnam War.  In short, they were trying to impose Order on the Chaos of the war by visiting a little Chaos on Catonsville, Maryland. 

What the defendants talked about in court-- in the form of blank verse -- was how their life experiences working with the poor, in the USA and elsewhere, changed how they saw foreign policy.  It changed how they saw the role of the Catholic Church and it definitely changed how they saw their own personal roles in the fracas.

The beleaguered judge -- trying to keep things Orderly, of course -- dragged them back again and again to the essential legal questions in the case.  They and their defense counsel calmly riposted, in essence, "You're missing the point."  The judge countered with, "Do you really think you're going to stop the war at this local court hearing? It doesn't work that way."  The Nine responded -- not in these words -- with "You are still completely missing the point."

And I started Googling a bit, because for sure they were far from the only ones protesting that war in various ways.  One of the defendants said he visited the deathbed of a young man who'd set himself on fire to protest the war. Like that famous Buddhist monk who immolated himself in protest: 

Looking him up, I discovered a whole list of people who did likewise.  It was a huge thing for a while there.  At least the Nine only immolated a stack of paper.  And in doing that they undoubtedly saved some lives.

There are comments through this little book challenging the reader to ask, OK, what is Chaos anyhow?  What is Order?  Where are they exactly the same?  Do they ever truly diverge?  Where?  Are they in fact opposites, and in that case how do we find it so hard to tell them apart?

This is great reading for Discordians everywhere.

The Irony!

It finally came out that one of the protestors killed in the January 6th riot at the Capitol Building, Rosanne Boyland, didn't precisely die of a "medical emergency" as originally stated in the news.  She was simply TRAMPLED TO DEATH by the mob, who used her as a JUNGLE GYM as they tried to kill a few more Capitol police officers.  There's some more footage, this time from a police bodycam -- if you can stand to see even more of the day's mayhem -- that shows her on the ground, intermittently visible in front of the line of officers being jolted over and over by the rioters trying to get past them and into the building.  Intermittently she's covered, and clearly being stomped, by the onrushing mob.

The irony here is that she showed up that day carrying one of these:

Another Discordian Lance Saint Lost To Us!

Gene Sharp, good Discordian saint material, has gone to the Great Wherever after a long, illustrious career spent teaching ordinary people to PROTEST. 

Here are a few of his training manuals:

All of his books are GREAT STUFF and there is a big pile of them for you to read.  The principles apply to all issues, from the tall to the small, but of course in THIS country we are all about making sure people have their civil rights, and being sure there's no taxation without representation, no unpopular wars, but also no gun control, and that kind of American protestamenta.  

In fact, no matter WHAT your issue, Gene Sharp will probably have some good suggestions for you.  And see the word "nonviolent" in some of those titles?  He's not suggesting Molotov cocktails or anything else that's going to get you arrested. 

AND YOU STILL MIGHT GET WHAT YOU'RE AFTER.