Living in A One-Sided World

The people who make the rules, the rich and powerful, are beginning to experience the world as the rest of us have to live it and they aren’t happy about it. And let’s face, it’s a pretty miserable world. The rules that most of us are forced to live by, out of necessity, are only suggestions for the rich and powerful. If you didn’t get that out of the 4 years of being mismanaged, ignored, abused, and ripped-off by the Trump 3rd Tier Elites, you will never get it. But a lot of people got it. And now that we are in our 3rd year of a pandemic that has cost this country at least 1,010,599 lives (as of June 25, 2022) and at least 6,300,000 worldwide, some people are discovering that they can use the same rules that have always applied to the idle rich and abusively powerful.

For example, if you are a skilled healthcare worker, like a registered nurse, you are in big demand today. Typically, an RN makes about $29/hour as a hospital employee. Hospital employees are historically abused and misused by their grossly overpaid and under-skilled and cynically misnamed “administration” executives. During the early days of Covid, that abuse went ballistic as hospitals’ staff were decimated by the killer virus and administrators did as little as possible to protect their employees from the disease and hostile, delusional patients. People died, people quit, and as of this writing about 20% of US healthcare workers have left the workforce and 47% of those remaining in that workforce plan to leave their “current role” or the occupation entirely in the next 3 years. One of the ways to leave the role as a hospital employee, for nurses, is to become a “travel nurse.” This article, “Why Do Travel Nurses Get Paid More | Travel Nursing,” does a nice job of explaining why a freelance nurse gets better pay, has more job opportunities and control, and is less stressed than a clinic or hospital employee. The bottom line, though, is more money and less hassle. If a hospital administrator is a pain in the ass, leave and work somewhere else in a heartbeat. Want more money? Travel nurses can make more than twice the salary of a permanent employee. Don’t like the work assignments, don’t do them and the employer’s leverage is practically zilch. Most likely, they won’t fire you because they are already way short on people to do the actual work and everyone knows the administrators don’t do anything resembling work. No patient ever picked a clinic because of the administrators.

Some friends who are retired nurse were recently marveling at the fact that people would apply for a job with Mayo Clinic, be offered the job, and not show up. The assumption was “people don’t want to work anymore,” but the fact is that in that business the odds are good that the applicant received several offers and just took a different one. Employers have been in that position for decades and when they pick an employee for a job most employers don’t bother telling the other candidates that they didn’t get the job and they sure don’t bother to tell them why they didn’t get the job. But for the last 100 years, employers have expected prospective employees to be massively more considerate than employers. No longer that world, is it?

Doctors are in a completely different and much better situation, thanks to mismanagement and Covid and the two combined. For example, pathologists are in hyper-short supply: Industry Voices—The shortage of invisible doctors | Fierce Healthcare. Where there were typically about 100 annual open positions in the country for pathologists there are well over 1,000 today and there are expected to be almost 6,000 open positions by the end of the decade. We can thank scumbags like Ronald Reagan for the current situation, since he made “work” a dirty word and single-handedly flipped a tax system that penalized idle “unearned income” into the spectacularly profitable but culturally worthless “financial services” investment income scam that has destroyed our manufacturing sector, diverted talent from all sorts of necessary functions (like medicine) to money shuffling, and set the country’s education system back at least 50 unrecoverable years. Doctors are retiring, many far earlier than they had originally planned or expected, and doctors are leaving the healthcare system. Even the moderately representative and grossly conservative AMA admits that one in three doctors are planning on cutting back their hours and commitment or leaving their practice entirely in the next three years. Doctors can pretty much go where they want to go, from research positions in the medical device or drug industries to teaching or administration jobs in completely different fields. You might think you are special with your cute little MBA party animal degree, but with an MD behind your name you are special.

And those thousands of open positions with a fraction of the necessary and critical applicants are just the tip of the “Great Resignation” iceberg. One of the longest lasting aftereffects of the Black Plague was an idea that is still growing; the rich and powerful are not as important as they imagine themselves to be. Like today’s Bezos, Musk, and the rest of that dependent, unskilled, over-valued ilk, the idle rich of the 12th Century might have been able to isolate themselves from the plague, but they couldn’t support themselves with their meager talents and when serfs realized that the penalties for walking away from the manor and the 3rd tier royalty were unenforceable, they walked. They kept walking until they created what we now consider “the middle class.” Royals have been trying to beat back that movement for at least 1,000 years, but the more education and talent is required to support a society the more people there are who can do the simple math that illustrates the inconsequential quality of idle elites. One of the key purposes of religion is to convince workers that God has chosen the idle rich for their special qualities and to question that is to question God. If you ever wanted to know why atheists' like Trump, the Kochs, Musk, and the rest toss money and acknowledgement at evangelical preachers, this is why. The priests have the same marching orders they’ve always had, “Baffle ‘em with bullshit, keep ‘em in line, don’t let them think for themselves or you’ll have to get a real job.”

As the author of “How the Black Death made life better” wrote, “With many state governments reducing unemployment benefits to push workers to fill open jobs, the aim, like England after the Black Death, is to reinstate and reinforce previous social and labor hierarchies, regardless of whose work has actually been ‘essential’ over the past 16 months.” As every competent employee in the world knows, if every CEO, CFO, COO, or any other C-word executive on the planet died tomorrow, the day after tomorrow would be no different than any day that came before it except that companies would be more profitable, more efficient, more flexible, and the stockholders would be richer. With Trump, we discovered that an incompetent and corrupt President is much worse than no President at all. And for 8 years of the worst recession in 75 years, the Republican Congress demonstrated that most of the design of the US government is so flawed that congresscritters can say out loud that their whole goal is to prevent the President from restoring the economy, rebuilding the infrastructure, and preparing the country for the future without any penalty.

For the moment, many employees are in the driver’s seat. Because humans are gullible and easily distracted, most likely this won’t last long. So, enjoy it while you can.

The “Too Many Men” Problem

War has always been an old man’s game, using young men as pawns, cannon fodder, and the tools of the “trade.” The January 6th seditionists were great demonstrations of what happens to a culture that breeds gross excesses of unskilled, uncreative, uneducated young men and provides them with nothing to do to either burn off their unproductive but dangerous energies or the necessary self-destructive opportunities nature intended for them. If we’re not going to give them swords and spears and pointless causes for them to flail away at each other in the service of their lords and masters, they need drugs and mindless activities with which to distract themselves. Thousands of years of human evolution and near-constant war between cities, states, and regional nations either caused or was were caused by these barely-functional young men and the need to expend them as quickly as possible. The true cause of war might be a surplus of  these barely-functional young men and the need to expend them as quickly as possible.

Forty years ago, a friend and I made a regular pilgrimage to San Clemente, CA (Doug always called it “San Clemency,” since Nixon was still boarded-up there at the time.) to scuba dive the San Clemente reef. Weather or ocean conditions were never a limiting factor for us. If we’d made the date for Sunday on the Monday before, regardless of 10’ surf, 2” visibility (seriously), cold, wind, or rain, we’d both be there on Sunday, suited-up, spearguns and game bags in hand, ready to swim the half-mile from the beach to the reef, and dive into the crashing water for fun and adventure. Over the years we repeated this exercise, we developed our own (probably not) definition of “macho”; which, essentially, translated to “stupid.”  When we chanted “this is really macho—as we flailed against the first 100’ of surf, sand, and wind until we got beyond the surf zone where we could comfortably paddle on our backs with our BCs partially inflated like undersized Zodiacs the rest of the swim to the reef—we were really telling ourselves that “this one might be the one that kills one or both of us.” Macho.

Doug was a PADI Dive Instructor and, eventually, I became a Dive Master (an instructor’s assistant) and as certified instructors we preached the PADI religion of “dive buddies” to our dive class students: as one PADI instructor quotes, “. . . the buddy system makes every dive safer and more fun.” And more complicated. Doug and I only paid slight notice to the whole buddy concept, especially at San Clemente. With visibility that rarely exceeded 3-4’ and was usually barely an arm’s reach, there was no point in pretending that once we went under water there was any chance that we’d be buddied-up. One of the last dive trips we did together, Doug asked, “What do you think is in store for two guys like us, who Nature intended to finish off in a war before we made it to 20 or 25 years old, who have ever appearance of living way past 40, at least?”

I totally understood what he meant. When I “celebrated” my 30th birthday, I was mostly stunned that I’d lived that long. Both in my career and in my recreation and even my everyday activities, there was no reasonable expectation from anyone who knew me that I’d live to 30, let alone 40+ years-old which I was at the time when this question was popped. Nature had clearly intended for both of us to, probably, lead a small group of young men against another group of young men in bloody, hand-to-hand combat, and to die “gloriously” on a battlefield strewn with other equally destined-and-designed-to-die young men. At 40, like lots of men, we both felt that thing often called a “mid-life crisis” but we were both aware enough to know that the crisis wasn’t about anything more than having outlived our use-by-dates. No expensive car,

Our national fixation and the weird and not particularly honest “respect” we give to people who spent time in the military is a pretty accurate example of the dichotomy between who our culture pretends these people are vs who we know they are. A recent pass through Minneapolis/St. Paul reminded me of the near-constant parade of homeless (mostly) men sporting “homeless, support your troops” signs.

The Obama Administration, several states, and a few cities combined to dramatically reduce the number of homeless vets between 2010 and 2019, but in 2019 21 out of every 10,000 veterans were homeless which is about 25% higher than non-vets. A 2012-2017 study found that military vets contributed to 13.5% of all US deaths by suicide but were only 7.9% of the US adult population. Male vets were almost twice as likely to commit suicide than female vets (with Army and Marine vets leading that “charge”). In March, 2020, the VA found that veteran unemployment was greater than 13%, opposed to a 3.5% unemployment rate for the general population at the time (Trump managed to degrade the rest of the US workforce to the vets’ unemployment level by August 2020.). Three of the top ten professions in the US that exhibit high divorce rates involve military jobs. All of that negative outcome is in spite of the desperate attempts by government and society to provide a “hand up” post-military service through generous veterans benefits, special employment consideration (especially in government employment), and the leniency society gives to those “who have served.” Being in the US military is either hazardous to the rest of your life or attracts people who are deficient in the first place. The fact that “nearly 1 in 5 of the [January 6] rioters charged so far have a history of serving in the military (only about 7% of Americans in general are military veterans)” is a pretty solid indication that being a military vet is no indication of either patriotism, loyalty to the oath service people take to the US Constitution, or intelligence or even sanity. The January 6th Hee Haw Riot was one of the most underachieving herds of human beings since . .  . every Trump rally ever.

Nixon ended the draft in July of 1973 in an attempt to end the Vietnam War protests. He was too late, of course, since Congress cut off funding for the war in late-1972, forcing the US to negotiate a “peace settlement” that allowed US troops to leave in January of 1973. The end of the draft instigated 50 years of a “poverty draft” where young people with no other economic hope feel forced to join the military in the desperate hope that they might receive some vocational training and an economic leg-up. Lake of education opportunities, college debt, and the general trends in the economy that will continue to offer fewer employment to the military’s current prime candidates: the military spends “$2.5 billion a year targeting high-achieving low-income youth with commercials, video games,personal visits and slick brochures.$2.5 billion a year targeting high-achieving low-income youth with commercials, video games,personal visits and slick brochures.”

Places like Puerto Rico and the deep South are  the Army’s and Marine’s prime recruiting territory. Puerto Rico ‘s unemployment rate is greater than 40%, and Army recruiting offices ensnare more than 4 times the number of Puerto Rican recruits than the average US-based recruiting offices. Thanks to a particularly sleezy section of the Bush “No Child Left Behind” education bill, public schools have to grant military recruiters the same access to children as do post-secondary schools and employers. Of course, the military recruiters don’t spend anywhere near as much time at private schools or high income suburban K-12 schools as they do in impoverished rural and urban schools. Kids who know they have options are less likely to give up 4 years of their life wasting away in the military. For example, “In 2015, a pair of Education Week reporters making use of the Freedom of Information Act reviewed the Army’s presence in Connecticut high schools and found major discrepancies in how the branch targeted middle-class and poor kids. Throughout the entire 2011–2012 school year, Army recruiters visited a higher-income high school—in which only 5 percent of students qualified for free or reduced lunch—just four times. By contrast, at another high school, where nearly half of the students qualified, Army recruiters stopped by more than 40 times before the spring semester’s final bell.” According to a RAND report, 40-65% of JROTC programs are clustered in the generally impoverished Southeast. JROTC programs are significantly more likely to exist in schools where the majority of students are eligible for free lunch programs. Schools with JROTC programs are twice as likely to have a large black student population than those with a more typically represented black population.

Nothing about military recruiting tactics would indicate that our military is staffed with the nation’s “best and brightest.” What we do have, however, is a military that is incredibly non-representative of the general population—racially, educationally, intellectually, and politically—and a well-armed and dangerously trained sector of and from the federal and state governments that are clearly easily duped into believing fantastic and unsubstantiated conspiracy gibberish and are very likely going to be the fall of the United States of America’s government and empire.

They Are Still Deplorable and Worse

 In September of 2016, at a New York fundraiser, Hillary Clinton said, “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?

"The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people — now how 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America. 

"But the other basket — and I know this because I see friends from all over America here — I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas — as well as, you know, New York and California — but that other basket of people are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they’re in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well."

 Fox and the other voter-programming media sources turned that into "She called you deplorables." And their viewers' rarely-used brains went "click" and the programming was complete. Now, whenever someone brings up some awful thing Trump or some other Russian/Republican says, the Marching Morons chant, "But 'deplorables!." 

Yesterday, October 31, 2020, Texas Republicans demonstrated just how deplorable they are. A gang of the Trump cult surrounded the Biden/Harris bus on the way to a rally and blocked the bus, preventing the rally while some other Trump brownshirts blocked traffic in New Jersy and New York. Of course TweetyPres's response was “In my opinion, these patriots did nothing wrong. Instead, the FBI & Justice should be investigating the terrorists, anarchists, and agitators of ANTIFA, who run around burning down our Democrat run cities and hurting our people!” Can we try to remember that ANTIFA is a fabricated wingnut dog whistle for "anti-fascists?" It is not an acronym for anything, numbnuts. 

So, these degenerate deadbeats have not just lost faith in democracy and are demanding that we end elections and move straight to the fascist state they appear to imagine will deliver them the prosperity they believe they deserve. That worked out well for their hero Hitler and his gangsters, didn't it? The tattered remains of the United States of America are being ridiculed around the world and we're barrelling toward a half-million dead Americans, carelessly murdered by Covid-19 and an incompetent federal government misled by a President who could not care less who dies as long as he can escape responsibility for the disasters he has created; including criminal charges and likely prison.

These fascist fanboys and groupies are the intellectual and cultural equivalent of those idiot teenagers who screamed their empty brains out at the sight or thought of the Beatles. This is not a political movement with goals, ideals, and an intellectual foundation. This is a cult of stupid that appears to be infecting almost half of the country and most of the degenerating Boomer geezers. Ms. Clinton was right. These people are deplorable and un-American at the highest level. Any Republican who doesn't denounce these farm animals as the "horrible people" they are is in the boat with Trump and his culters. 

Trump, of course, is not going to bring back American industry. That ship sailed with Reagan and his "tax reforms" that allowed the hyper-rich to get rich from "unearned income" and inheritance instead of investments in manufacturing equipment and facilities. Trump is just one of the many decadent outcomes of the Reagan Revolution that moved the US from being a manufacturing nation to a banking and service economy. You don't create world class products by gold plating a toilet and calling it a "throne." A doofus who managed to go bankrupt mismanaging a casino has no hope in the world of "bringing back good jobs" for an uneducated, unskilled labor force. That ship sailed in the 80s and we'll be playing catch-up from the middle of the pack from here out. 

A day before the 2020 election, some Grand Rapids, MI Trumpers demonstrated a new low in deplorable behavior by defiling headstones in a Jewish cemetery. "The [Michigan Democratic Jewish] caucus said the vandalism occurred at Ahavas Israel Cemetery, and photos show the words 'TRUMP' and 'MAGA' painted onto the graves. These statements were painted on the night before the election, the same day President Donald Trump is holding a rally in Grand Rapids."

I guess this is another demonstration of who these people really are. If your idea of a good job would be wearing a uniform and carrying a weapon to terrorize your neighbors into submission, Trump is probably your man. If you dream of wearing a swastika on your shoulder and hunting down "brown people" to feed into der Führer's gas chambers and mass graves, Donny can probably manage that. Don't fool yourself, though. Even if you manage to end life on this earth, for a while, it won't elevate you to anything beyond deplorable.