Moon Day

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 862-865

Yet what I really wanted was to pace wolfishly around the house, half-naked in tattered jeans, spouting Dylan Thomas or my own bad poetry. Or go to a séance. Or cover a war for the New York Times. Or eat fudge for breakfast. Or have sex on the kitchen table. Or not make the bed every morning. Or better yet, sell everything in that big beautiful house, pack up some underwear and my bewildered husband and hightail it overseas for a while. I would have settled for an annual two-week car vacation to some dull, dusty town, if it meant I could actually drag Drew away from work. I would have been happy stealing a midday nap with him every once in a while - but enterprising young executives don't permit themselves such indulgences.

Instead, I mastered gift-wrapping for the endless celebrations of family birthdays, anniversaries, retirements, baby showers, graduations and Ground Hog days. Instead, I reluctantly climbed the corporate ladder into an airless office, amassing clients and doing power lunches - and tried to remember to wear underwear. Instead, I attended the mandatory Smith Sunday dinners, quietly chewed my roast beef, and nodded sympathetically at conversations I had heard before. I was proud of myself for keeping my mouth shut.

And besides, I had a gold card with no spending limit to anesthetize the empty feelings in my life.
Dana McNairn
A Marriage In Seven Parts
Dropped Threads 2

By the time our son was two, I'd been a homemaker long enough. Never good at repetitive tasks, I completely lost it over potty training. Spending two months teaching someone to pee in a container wasn't mentally stimulating enough, so I got an entry-level government job, which was kind of like potty-training but with pay. My first year working, half of my monthly salary paid for daycare.
C. J. Papoutsis

They Didn't Come With Instructions

Dropped Threads 2

God Says Yes To Me
Kaylin Haught
Poetry 180

I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic
And she said yes
I asked her if it was okay to be short
And she said it sure is
I asked her if I could wear nail polish
Or not wear nail polish
And she said honey
She calls me that sometimes
She said you can do just exactly
What you want to
Thanks God I said
And is it even okay if I don't paragraph
My letters
Sweetcakes God said
Who knows where she picked that up
What I'm telling you is
Yes Yes Yes

Look around - find out who has integrity. Find your tribe, as Margaret Laurence said… You have family you don't even know yet.
Lorri Neilsen Glenn
Believe You Me
Dropped Threads 3

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 858-861

Christopher Browning’s collection of essays, “The Path to Genocide,” notes that it was the “moderate,” “normal” bureaucrats, not the zealots, who made the Holocaust possible. Germaine Tillion pointed out “the tragic easiness [during the Holocaust] with which ‘decent’ people could become the most callous executioners without seeming to notice what was happening to them.” The Russian novelist Vasily Grossman in his book “Forever Flowing” observed that “the new state did not require holy apostles, fanatic, inspired builders, faithful, devout disciples. The new state did not even require servants—just clerks.”
Chris Hedges
The Careerists

If you live in America in the 21st century you’ve probably had to listen to a lot of people tell you how busy they are. It’s become the default response when you ask anyone how they’re doing: “Busy!” “So busy.” “Crazy busy.” It is, pretty obviously, a boast disguised as a complaint.
...
Notice it isn’t generally people pulling back-to-back shifts in the I.C.U. or commuting by bus to three minimum-wage jobs  who tell you how busy they are; what those people are is not busy but tired. Exhausted. Dead on their feet.
The ‘Busy’ Trap
By TIM KREIDER
New York Times
June 30, 2012

This faulty association of work with virtue hits the nail on the head. Why should we prioritize work above spending time with our families, or in the sunshine, or consuming art? With frequency, we glibly declare that at the end of our lives we will remember the latter group of activities more fondly than the former, but we seem reluctant to embrace that ethos in the here and now.
How Less Work for Everybody Could Solve a Lot of Our Economic Turbulence and Make Life More Pleasant
AlterNet / By Sarah Seltzer
[emphasis JS]

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 855-857

A new report by the respected National Employment Law Project (nelp.org) titled “Big Business, Corporate Profits, and the Minimum Wage,” said that “the majority (66 percent) of low-wage workers are not employed by small businesses but by large corporations.” The 50 largest of their employers are mostly “in strong financial positions.” And note this finding by NELP: “The top executive compensation averaged $9.4 million last year at these firms.” This means that the bosses, before taking a lunch on January 2, made more money than a minimum wage worker makes in a year. Talk about the corrosive effects of inequality which have been fed by the top one percent taking 93 percent of the income growth in 2010, according to Holly Sklar of Business for a Fair Minimum Wage (businessforafairminimumwage.org).

Ralph Nader

The Democratic Party Sleeps on FDR’s Legacy

August 8, 2012
[emphasis JS]

  The most dangerous force in the industrialized world does not come from those who wield radical creeds, whether Islamic radicalism or Christian fundamentalism, but from legions of faceless bureaucrats who claw their way up layered corporate and governmental machines. They serve any system that meets their pathetic quota of needs.

Chris Hedges

TheCareerists

By the time of Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street (1853), acedia had lost the last of its religious reverberations and was now an offense against the economy. Right in the heart of robberbaron capitalism, the title character develops what proves to be terminal acedia. It is like one of those western tales where the desperado keeps making choices that only herd him closer to the one disagreeable finale. Bartleby just sits there in an office on Wall Street repeating, "I would prefer not to." While his options go rapidly narrowing, his employer, a man of affairs and substance, is actually brought to question the assumptions of his own life by this miserable scrivener -- this writer! -- who, though among the lowest of the low in the bilges of capitalism, nevertheless refuses to go on interacting anymore with the daily order, thus bringing up the interesting question: who is more guilty of Sloth, a person who collaborates with the root of all evil, accepting things-as-they-are in return for a paycheck and a hassle-free life, or one who does nothing, finally, but persist in sorrow?
Nearer, my Couch, to Thee
Thomas R. Pynchon
[emphasis JS]

Pills Are Magic Bullets

Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 851-854

As the relationships between parents and children evolve, exemplification replaces threat as the primary motivational mechanism.
Robert W. Fuller, 
Somebodies And Nobodies





When a child hits a child, we call it aggression.

When a child hits an adult, we call it hostility.

When an adult hits an adult, we call it assault.

When an adult hits a child, we call it discipline.
Haim Ginott

We should not be surprised that students subjected to command education behave like workers in a command economy; most do just enough to get by.
Robert W. Fuller, 
Somebodies And Nobodies

I contributed to the running of a military that was involved in an immoral and unjust war in Vietnam, knew that it was wrong but was frozen in place rationalizing that I would do my job and stay alive. The bars holding me in place weren't physical but psychological. I believed that I had no choice. The authoritative structure of the military, the government, precedent dictated that what I was doing was right, just, and noble. And yet something inside me KNEW it was wrong, immoral. As long as this culture, and I as an individual in it, believe that authority knows much better than me, you and I will walk that road following authority.
blm1242
comment on Chris Hedges's article "The Careerists"