My posts are starting to suck!

Usually I write a post at some point when an idea pops into my head, then I come back to it and edit it later.  I have been systematically going through these unpublished posts and trying to edit them and get them up dated when they were written.  What I am finding is that a lot of the ones that seem to have been written of late, as in the last couples months or so, are not very good.  I always felt for such a long time that there was a critical insight, an analysis that made sense and had a point in my writing.  Much of what I have just read though in the last couple days has been scattered and fragmented, with the point getting lost somewhere between start and end.

I used to write a great deal about the conflict within us and our society.  But that is not coming out in these posts of late.  I was out there in the world, doing, working, and critiquing.  Now I am mostly holed up in a basement trying desperately to find something to do, someplace to live.  I have to say that this is dispiriting and seems to be effecting me on a subconscious level.  It is amazing to read about the unemployed and about skills being lost, while I sit in a basement without any outlet to really use mine.  I don't think I am losing anything, in fact I feel like I am gaining perspective and a deeper understanding of struggle, nevermind desire and drive (that feels more like desperation, lol).  This additional contextual clarity will aid me some day, but still, the things I am editing right now need rewriting not editing. 

Where was I when I wrote those things?  Both literally and cognitively?  Was I out and about, writing on my phone maybe?  Or more importantly, what was my mindset?  Perhaps I am or was scattered to the point of desperation.  When you have a million things to do, you just do them.  It is the stress of all these things that makes you unable to get them done, not the tasks themselves.  When that stress takes the form of not knowing where you will live, how you will pay for food, and what the future holds, not to mention the stress of the loss of a special someone all at once, things seem easily scattered. 

Basically, I guess what I am saying is there is little coherent social critique in emotions.  My feelings of stress from a lack of employment and the subsequent prospect of homelessness are just that: raw feelings.  They are not analysis.  Granted, if I could turn those feelings into an analysis of themselves, where they come from and why, I would be looking at avenues for alleviating the issues generating that stress.  But I think it takes a clear mind to provide solid analysis, and when you are worrying about food and shelter, that clarity of mind doesn't readily exist.  You become desperate, reaching for things that you think could solve those emotions, rather than the fog that makes them worse.  You want permanence and career jobs rather than the retail or server work that can replace your short term desperation with longer term despair.  But what then when they meld together over years?  Struggle compounds.    

I am seeing this transition of self expressive capacity - the the wavering between analytical writing, and desperation and the discombobulation of a page - and can't help but wonder how we can still talk about doing away with things like school lunch programs, public housing, and other such "entitlement programs" that so directly affect children coming from disadvantaged homes.  How could they not be affected?  How could they be considered to have the same opportunities as others?  When you go home to a nice happy home with a family, food, and human security, you wake up the next morning ready to go back to school - homework done, familially supported, relaxation time had.  But what about those without that?  I can physically see the toll its taken on me - and I'm an adult!  Imagine a 7 or 8 year old kid without food or stability?  Of course it is going to affect their outputs.

Anyway, again, I'm all over the place.  There is a lot of stress on me, as there is on the millions of un/under employed and poor in this country and world.  Those of you with jobs and wealth don't see it, you don't see the struggle, the pain.  You don't see the strength it takes every day.  You just want to tell us how easy it is and what to do to make it all work.  As if I had complete and total control over someone else giving me a job.  Bottom line is, there just aren't enough jobs out there for everyone, many of those that are don't pay living wages or offer career value, and there isn't enough money to get funding to start your own.  Whether I can do the work or not doesn't matter.  My biggest task has become dealing with the pain and stress of not knowing what's going to happen next...

Sympathy accepted, job interviews rewarded!!   



 

The World Bank

So I had the interview with the World Bank today. Took the bus down to DC from NYC in the morning, met an old friend for lunch and then hit the interview.  Headed back now on the bus.  Bottom line is that I don't know that I could pass up this opportunity, but that I don't really want to go, nor do I know that I am actually the right person for this job.  But I suppose I should start at the beginning of the interview. 

It was myself and two other guys. We hit it off right off the bat. Immediately developing a report. It turns out that I was pretty much hand picked out of the stack of resumes. This project in Kenya has apparently been having a problem in relation to the government. Apparently they usually take people for these positions that are phd students in economics that can just come in and do the research. This position in Kenya is apparently different though, and they want someone a little older with management experience and the capacity to either demand or garner respect more readily both through demeanor and experience. They seemed to think I was an ideal fit for this on paper, and expressed mid-way through the interview that I seemed just right for it.... then... they started asking the technical research based quantitative questions.

Basically, the job itself would be to oversee a huge operation. I would be overseeing the entire field assessment project for to educational programs in this region of Kenya and all of the data collection. Over 50 schools for just one of the two programs and a research company with a team of some 50 plus people, and several local personnel directly working with me on the local environment and cultural aspects of the study. Then additional, I would be working directly with the Kenyan government, the World Bank, their implementation team, local universities, researchers in the US, and who knows whatever else.

This project has also been going on for 4 years and has yet to have an impact assessment due to these issues they seem to be facing with the Kenyan Government. My roll would be to be able to come in and "play hardball” and get this thing done.  I actually kind of think this may be a great thing for me managerially and in terms of my interpersonal skills and ability to softly be assertive, but it also begs the question "why?"  Why do you need to play hardball with the Kenyan government?  This needs a lot more research and assessment.  Also, while I am managing all of these people, I would still have to be setting up and running a data collection operation using quantitative skills that I have not used in a number of years. I have spent most of my time working with qualitative methods and more culturally sensitive approaches. Listening to people rather than giving them questionnaires and codes. My job here would be to set up the questionnaires and finalize them. I would have local assets to help bring cultural relevance to the project. Most importantly though, I will be working on generating the sample sizes and and orchestrating their adherence, helping implement and design the entire research project. This is something that I have not done on this type of level.

I suppose I need more information as to what type of support structure I would have there to get this done before I could say that I felt comfortable that I could definitely succeed in this job. I of course believe that I can do anything. I can learn/refresh these research skills quickly and easily. I also think that they would be tremendously benefited by the other skills that I bring in research terms and my ability to think against the grain and outside the box. But ultimately, they need the data sets to be flawless. Can I guarantee this will happen? Can they be certain of this? This is the crux of it all and I'm not sure what they will think. But if they chose me, it is because they think that I am the best person for the job. I would have to take that as confidence in my capacity to make this research project happen. I know I could manage it. And I know I could be a part of designing and implementing the research design. However, if I am responsible for doing this on my own, then I would have to think about whether its the best thing for me.

There is of course another factor with this: the compensation. I was thinking that the World Bank would send you abroad with a solid support structure behind you. An expat type structure with housing, stipend, etc. Nope. They fly you there and put you in a hotel for a week or two while you find your own accommodation and get things set up there by yourself. Really? The World Bank?!?! And then they pay exactly the same as the admin assistant job I just interviewed for in NYC? $40-45?!!? Really?!? That project described above and the same pay to shuffle documents and flight itineraries for three executives? Yeah the cost of living is obviously different, but still, it's a temporary position that I don't even think now comes with benefits, insurance, a computer, whatever. I have a lot more questions about this. Is there an office? How do I set up a life, internet, communications, etc. You just want me to be able to drop myself down in Kenya and make shit happen at the high level that the World Bank requires? This can't be right. Any company I've ever known of any salt helps you get set up, or at least outsources it for you. Some assistance.  If is that's ll you get though, it truly must take one hell of a special breed of person to be able to do this in random and different countries in the world. I just don't think it can be right and goes against what I've heard about them in the industry.   There must at lest be someone there to help.

But that is to be seen I guess. When I am offered a job, I can start discussing that. But it is a discussion I will definitely be having if offered. Because if I have to set up my whole life there on my own from day one, jet lagged, unfamiliar, and with no support, their project is going to suffer. It is one thing to show up in Prague and figure it out, China, Sierra Leone, etc, when you don't have anything you have to get done that day. But there..... I step off the plane and its go time. Get the project up and running, while you look for a place to live and a life all with no help. Would be amazing. If I could do that, I could do anything.

For the Love of Unemployment!!

At the depths of my soul there is this warm and tender place where I really just wants to be loved and to love every single last person that I come across.  This is a difficult thing to bare.  There are lots of people out there and they all have their flaws and their amazing things that make them burst out of crowds.  We all have these things, we all are wonderful.  And I guess it is how we handle the fluctuations within ourselves and thus who we end up presenting to the world that makes us stand out to more people than not.  I must say that what the last couple years have done to me is to threaten some of what I bring to the table in terms of all things amazing. 

I am needier than I once was, and I think it hurts me daily.  But I don't think it is that I as a person have become more needy, just that my situation has created more of a need within me right now.  There aren't as many avenues today to feel love as there once was.  A wonderful person said to me the other night that me and my situation take up most all of the space in our conversations.  I didn't really know how to react.  I know this I suppose, and I know that I am spending so much time right now leaning on other people for support.  I need to talk, I need to stay positive, to have fun with others, even you could say to be distracted by the wonderfulness of people and their humanity.  And I don't mean that to belittle anyone as simply a distraction, but the point is that we all have things in our lives that provide us with supportive emotions, positive feelings and negative ones.  Finding a balance that allows us to function on a level of happiness that makes it worth soldering on with a smile is important.  I have had to rely on others too much for that, for too long of a time now. 

You know, when you're job is going well, you can manage personal strife.  When you're happy with your personal situation and take pleasure from it, a shitty job somehow seems half as bad.  Someone to go home to, friends to hang out with, things to do, whatever.  But when these other things are all sporadic elements of daily ups and down and don't provide much support, work seems worse, interesting things seem less interesting, and you start reaching out for more space.  Encroaching upon the world. 

I think this is where I am right now.  I have no job, I have a tenuous housing situation, and a good deal of personal turbulence.  It all forces me to lean on other people for emotional support. And people are something that the unemployed are not generally surrounded by all day.  For example: today was an absolute emotional roller coaster for no reason at all.  I woke up just fine, good thoughts for a positive day.  But then I went  to check on an application I submitted a while back for a position that I really liked: assistant to the democracy program at a research, legal, think tanky thing.  I was of course resoundingly shunned at the door.  They don't have time for that kind of in-person stuff, I'm only worth what I can put on a piece of paper after all.  Yeah, I could have bullshitted my way past the gatekeeper, faking knowledge of something or an appointment, but I'd like to think that my integrity won't give way to my desperation.  So I left not thinking much of it until I got on my bike and started feeling this physical reaction.  Was it anxiety, stress, despair, desperation?  Something surrounding all that most likely.  My throat was tensing up, my breath became a bit askew.  Why?  Why would some simple guy not alowing me the time of day mean so much?  Why would I react like that?  I called my mom, texted a friend. 

Then I pounded away on an application for another hiking store job.  This time a big chain that would probably pay me this time.  lol.  I've been waiting for openings there for months and finally.... there are 14!!  Yes, fourteen openings for sales floor people.  I'm golden I'm thinking!!  I get the application in and ride my not so shiny Schwinn right the hell down there and walk in the door to tell them exctly what I'm there to do. 

"I just applied 15 minutes ago, and I want to speak to a manager about it."  

I get sent downstairs to the next level of interrogation.

"I know they don't usually see people, but I've got experience!" I pronounce in a subtly magnanimous tone. 

Person to person, I slowly get closer until after a decent wait, wala!!  I get one minute with the hiring manager and the assistant manager of the store as they walk past me on the way to something usually more important than unemployed stalkers.  And it works, my 30 second elevator view into "timistan" that I punctuated with a lots of eye contact, overt magnanimity, and a smile that seemed to have won them both over. 

"What's your name", the manager said as he pulled out a pen and wrote it down, the hiring manager then said "you'll be hearing from us soon".  

I of course cap it off with a

"Hey, I'm ready now, I can start tomorrow and be on the floor for labor day!"  

I'm smiling as I head for the door.  Maybe it just might have worked! 

Also, just before I left to go there, I got an email back from a woman I interviewed with a month ago with a Children's organization.  She said I hadn't gotten the job because other candidates had food justice expertise she couldn't ignore, but said that she really enjoyed our interview and my perspective on justice, youth, and life, and that I would be great in a classroom with kids.  She wants me to apply for the other jobs I'd seen just recently (yes, she was following up from my pestering her) and that she'd stump for me in their office.  This is great!  Especially on top of the hiking store...  I come back and get started.  Ugh... now I've got so many applications to do, but when?  I get another application in that a friend sent me for a temp agency working with non-profits.  I send out an email that may some day lead to my current dream position.  I'm feeling good. 

But then I start yearning for someone to talk to and I start wondering why I haven't heard from such and such.  As if people don't have things to do.  It starts getting deeper and deeper within me.  Why does this get so internalized?  I mean who cares?  It's a text message, a simple communique that means so little in the larger scheme of things.  So why am I so emotionally week right now?  Why do I want or need so desperately to be loved right now?  Is it because my every day is spent getting rejected?  Cover letter after cover letter, no response.  And I looked at the position for the legal think tanky democracy position I stoped by at and the person in that spot now; shit, yeah I'm not going to get it.  I've got plenty of democratization experience, researching, writing, whatever, but its all on international issues.  Sure I'll get work in Kenya, or Moldova, or the Mars.  But no work in the US.  All my experiece is abroad, and on issues abroad, how does that translate here?  I know the world, but how many people here care about the world?  We have a lot of our own problems.

So anyway, back to the narrative.... I decide to head to a movie, 8:30 at Union sq, that Borne movie.  So I get there and its not there.  I try the other Union Square theater, nope not at 8:30, only at 10.  So I missed it all and go home annoyed at my computer, slowly emotionally digressing.  It's a freaking movie?!?!  Turns out Google somehow thinks that the Union Square in NYC movie link is best suited to send you Union Square in San Franscisco's cinema page... who knew!?  But hey, their three hours behind maybe I can still make that one!?  Need to get that teleporter of mine fixed anyway... ;)  But yeah, my point is that this stuff doesn't matter, yet it so tremendously affects me right now.  Little things that are now a struggle that never were.  But most importantly, what I am trying to say, is that its about the space I am taking in other people's lives. 

I sit around wanting to hear from them, needing to almost.  And in my head I worry and wonder like I never used to.  Like the bonds are somehow closer now.  Like I somehow need them more now than I once did.  I never used to need people.  I simply wanted them.  But now it feels more like a need.  Like I have such an uphill battle everyday just to stay upright that it helps to have someone to hold on to.  I miss Occupy, I miss my Africa work, but most of all I miss being strong enough to work on them.  It is sad. 


I know that I am hurting myself in my personal relationships right now.  I dive in, give myself to every person I meet.  But they don't do the same.  They don't need to, shouldn't even.  They have jobs, and lives, and friends, and whatever else content stable people have.  I have none of that.  I have dreams and desires, and lots of potential energy, but little of the kinetic stuff.  This is a long way away from the me that I've always known.  Yes, I've been through spells when I haven't had work or didn't win the big game or whatever and I reach out more, as we all do.  But when things are going well you don't need other people to help things go well.  I don't know how I'd manage if I didn't have so much self-confidence.  Even as I write this in fleeting despair, I feel that success will come, that some day I will say I told you so!  If I didn't believe in myself and my abilities I'd be a mess laying in an alley way somewhere. 

I guess in all of this the only thing I can ask is that people try to understand where I am.  I reach out because I need something to hold on to.  I take up this space because I'm struggling.  And it pains me to know it hurts you all, all I want to do is know more about you, about your life, but all I'm capable of right now it seems is trying to hold mine together.  So I talk and talk about my dreams, desires, and potential rather than listening to stories about your jobs, and lives, and friends - because that's what I want - and what I want for you, and what I want for everyone and their relationships, but feel I can't do.  To be able to revel together in ourselves as strong separate wholes.  Unfortunately for my part in that bargain right now I am a volatile needy half.  I promise it is not the life I've had and want, but it is the one I'm in right now, yes in the plight that I'm in Sam, Sam I am.  So please world, bare with me.  I will return both here and there, as a mouse, and in a house... we all will.... 

Cars suck

ugh.... my car... what a nightmare.  Having this car here in NYC is a disaster.  I bought the car for the job I had in Connecticut.  I had to as the job required driving all over the state.  I was desperate, both for work and thus for the car.  So I went to dealer after dealer and bought the best thing I could get financed as I didn't have any money.  I then proceeded to put almost 25 thousand miles on the car in six months.  However, when I bought it, no one bothered to mention that the car had a transmission issue.  $7200 for the car, but it needs a new transmission now and it didn't present any issues until after the one month warranty expired.

Fast forward to today and the car is worth $5000, but still needs that new transmission.  I owe about $4500 on it.  Between the payments and the insurace I am in for about $300 per month right now.  I want desperatly to get rid of it.  But I can't, I can't sell a car that needs a new transmission.  Nevermind for a enough money to pay off the loan.  And it of course makes no sense to sell it and then still pay the loan, not that I think you can even do that.  So basically I'm underwater on my car.

Then you add in New York City to this equation and you have stress.  Parking is a nightmare.  Alternate side of the street parking.... once or twice a week you have to go sit in the car for an hour and a half and move it around for the street sweeper.  Your whole week becomes planned aorund your car.  Moving it the night before, or that day, or scheduling time to sit in it, getting to where it is, etc.  Doing errands or driving based on when the street cleaning happens so you can park.  For example:  my whole schedule in leaving my parents in Rhode Island last week was so that I would get to the city by noon to get a spot in the 11-12:30 parking spots.  Of course it didn't work, I missed it, but managed eventually.  Looking for parking is horrible - especialy in the Greenwich Village.  You can spend an hour driving around.  Brooklyn is much better, easy to find spots, but I'm mostly in the West Village right now so tricky.

Anyway, point is.  I hated cars before I came to NYC.  I don't like what they do for the environment, I don't like having to maintain them, and while I don't mind driving them, I hate that american society relies on them so much.  Give me public transportation and something to read please!!  Or a bike!  I can get my exercise in and commute!  (that's what I'm working with now).  But anyway, here I am stuck with this car.  I can't get rid of it, I have to deal with it, ad I have to pay for it.  Oh wait, I have no money, I have no job, and in another few weeks don't have a place to stay either - except maybe in that car.  Needless to say, my stress levels are high.

So last night I go out to the car to head to Rhode Island to do some work for my parents, and whoops.... it doesn't start.  #@%#$%  All there is to say about that.  Can something go right??  Please???  I hate that thing.  Something's got to happen here.  Anything...  ;)  But I've gotten countless job apps in over the last couple weeks and two interviews coming up.  So we'll see....  :)   

Guns

So I've got to weigh in on this gun debate given the rash of large scale shootings that seem to litter the news every other day now.   At what point are we going to stop saying that these are individual actors acting singularly and in isolation?  There is just too many of them:

"More than 32,000 people in the US die from gunshot wounds yearly—five times the number of US servicemen and women killed in over a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Another 70,000 or so are wounded by guns presenting the troubling statistic of an average of 280 Americans shot daily."

America has a societal problem, and it's of epidemic proportions. We have a society that is rotting from the inside, and practically handing out the lethal tools to act out our angers and aggressions.  But, this issue is so much deep than the economy or guns, its about a country and a society in decline.

Lets just take this most recent rash of incidents.  A doctoral student reportedly to have schizophrenia loses it and kills/wounds over sixty people trying to watch a movie.  Then a white supremest kills another six "dark people" while they're trying to exercise their religious freedom and go to the equivalent of church on a Sunday.  Today, a man starts firing indiscriminately when someone tries to show up to evict him from his home?  Doesn't take much to put together pieces of a decrepit puzzle together here.

I have a cousin with schizophrenia that lives in Colorado.  The care is atrociousness.  He just can't really get any.  He hasn't been able to get on disability, can't keep and income or a home, has gone after his mother with a knife, and was found naked in over a foot of snow having walked up a mountain in the Rockies.  He thinks he is Jesus Christ, King James, and himself all together as if time was nonlinear.  But even with all that, he can't get proper care.  He's tried going to Minnesota and California but still can't sort it out.  I wonder what kind of care the Aurora shooter was getting?  I also wonder how much student debt he had (or that his relatives now have as it can roll over with death).  What do you think his job prospects were for when he finished school?  Or those around him that he cared about?

Fast forward to Wisconsin and we find a white supremacist trained by the army to kill, and perhaps even trained in the army to kill "colored" people.  A whole army base becomes notorious for issues with basically breeding white supremacist communities in the nineties, yet has anything been done about it?  And what about his life now?  He lost his home not to long ago, foreclosed on of course (at least he didn't shoot the people that came to kick him out - they were probably white).  How did this happen?  He couldn't stick in the army long enough for a pension, reportedly due to his racist tendencies (but maybe due to spending cuts). So he's thrown out to the wolves, but he's trained to kill, he should be fine, right?  So he struggles to make ends meet as a truck driver, ends up down on his luck.  Hate fostered deep within him, a scapegoat right around the corner, and what it seems he must have thought was nothing to lose.

Now what about Texas today?  "You aren't gonna evict me from my house!"  I can just hear him yelling out the window.  How do you think he felt about his luck?  About his prospects for the future?  What do you think his socio-economic situation was?  I'm pretty willing to bet he wasn't so close to the 1% (despite apparently living on George Bush Blvd).

It's pretty obvious here people.  What we have is a society in decline and disrepair.  Disparity of incomes have sky rocketed over the last several decades, poverty is rampant - 15% of the population, almost 50 million people (most of which are children).  Unemployment nationally is above 15% when you include everyone not working that  wants to, but some places like California have unemployment rates over 20%.  All these numbers are pretty similar to the numbers of people that have no health care.  Sadly, these are not all the same people in each of these statistics.  House after house is being foreclosed upon, job after job is being shed, a drought stricken heartland is collapsing while the government subsidizes making fuel out of corn to feed our car addiction, our inner cities are seeing rising poverty levels, epidemic crimes statistics, brutal police repression, and overflowing prisons, while everywhere is seeing shrinking service programs for the needy and plummeting education budgets.  Yet our "leaders" go on vacation while their approval ratings have flirted with single digits.  And lets not even get started on 20% of our GDP going to servicing a national debt mostly owed to China and various middle eastern enclaves that we claim we need to defend ourselves from, or on the walls we are putting up around our boarders, or definitely on the rich sitting on their verandas buying political power.

This disaster is of course all happening while we are bombarded with useless distractions throughout our daily existence.  Billboards pollute our eyes with visions of uselessness, TV's fill our ears with aimless chatter of "real" world scenarios that none of us will ever live, medications "alleviate" joint pain only to cause, dry mouth, headaches, runny noses, occasional aches and pains, impotency, possible cardiac arrests, insanity, and in "a very small percentage of test cases" death.  Advertisements for giant manly trucks help dry up the Midwest, toys, clothes, bags, TV's, video games, cars, boats, whatever!  We don't need them all, but our whole lives have become about obtaining them all - consuming them.  The message is all sitting there directly in front of us.  Obtain everything, you need it.  It will help distract you from all the things that suck about the world we live in.

But we don't seem to be able to put two and two together.  To recognize that we have created a cycle of disrepair and disrepute.  This sordid society is eating itself from within, and giving itself the tools to do it more quickly - guns.

Personally, I think a gun is too much power for one person to hold in there hands at one time.  I don't want to have the power to so easily kill in my hands.  A simple twitch of a finger and you're dead.  Not for me.  But I also, who am I to tell others what to do and how to think?  I can only lead by example and express my views with little or no expectations.  So, I'm not going to tell you not to have your guns, but I am going to tell you that you must live with the repercussions of a society foundationally infused with them.  In a perfect world guns could exist, no one would use them.  But we don't live in utopia.  We live in the the real world, and that world is falling apart.  People are desperate, they want, they need, and they can't have - they just simply don't have the means, and it is becoming entrenched.  As a society we are no longer moving up the class ladder in ways we did in the past.  Real wages have been dropping for decades, yet we've learned to live with the expectations of a society built decades ago on different parameters and with different rules.  We have become full of desperate, hungry, angry, disenfranchised people and are having problems with it.  But you give all those people access to guns, and you've got a massacre.  Just like in Aurora, Wisconsin, Texas, and every major city in the US everyday. 
And this is the saddest thing about the society we've created.  There was on average 280 people shot today in America.  But we only heard about seven of them.  This shit happens EVERY day, all the time, yet we do nothing.  70,000 people a year don't act alone.  They are not isolated individuals.  They are a large part of a society that glorifies guns and criminality, and then gives people every reason and desperate desire to resort to crime, anger, and despair during the last desperate moments of their struggles.

Yes, I AM for much stricter gun control, draconian control actually given the way our society is today.  And maybe it wouldn't always have to be like that.  Maybe someday we could live in a society without the desperation and hopelessness that we see more and more today.  A society that's taken the desire to kill away from people.  If the Aurora killer had proper medical care and didn't think he had to get an advanced degree he couldn't pay for to get a job he believed he had to have to be able to survive, would we still be in this place today?  Would I still be awake writing this crap?  Maybe, because we'd also have to stop creating killer after killer in the name of controlling oil wealth and mineral rights across the world with desperate "volunteers" from our failed education and economic systems.  These issues are so big, so intertwined and never ending.  What the biggest thing I'm for is a country that starts realizing that WE are the problem.  Yes, us, our country, our society, and our choices are creating the images and society we see in the news and the individuals that perpetrate this news.  Is individual choice and culture so different in England where they have 58 something gun murders a year?  Or what about in Germany where the police shoot 85 bullets PER YEAR IN THE ENTIRE COUNTRY!!?!  In America we can drop that on one "perp" in one night.

Our society is sick.  It is sick at it's core.  And just as it is rotting away from the inside, we must heal it from the inside.  We have to focus on the sick and gangrenous parts: the unemployed, the destitute, the impoverished, the uninsured, the indebted, the marginalized, the hopeless.  Because they are in fact our brightest asset, the part of America with the biggest up side, the most talent and aspiration left unfulfilled.  Now of course there are a lot of different philosophies on how to do this.  But I can assure you that if we don't start there with every ounce of our efforts, it doesn't mater what we do with taxes, marriage equality, abortion rights, or even guns, we'll go straight downhill no matter what - just like we are right now.  The problem that we're having within all this though, is that we're neither controlling our anger and despair, or what we do with that anger when we are consumed by it.  Until we can figure out how to support and provide for our entire society, we can't allow people the means to so easily take others with them to the deepest depths of their despair.

 

Oh, and that cop that got shot today, yeah, he had a gun on him - didn't help him much though did it?

Fighting for Fair Labor!! (just not yours)

Really?!?  Hypocrisy knows no bounds?  I just spent a few hours working on an application for an organization working for "fair" labor practices throughout the world.  Yes, I'm going to name them: 

The Fair Labor Association (FLA) combines the efforts of industry, civil society organizations, and colleges and universities to protect workers’ rights and improve working conditions worldwide by promoting adherence to international labor standards.

Sounds great right?  And then they put this great disclaimer on the bottom of the job advertisement:

FLA is an equal opportunity employer. It is the FLA's policy to employ, compensate and advance personnel without regard to race, color, religious creed, citizenship, political activity or affiliation, marital status, age, national origin, ancestry, physical or mental disability, medical condition, sexual orientation, veteran status, family care status, sex or gender.

 But then at the very bottom they say, "applications without salary history will not be considered."

Wait, you mean you don't discriminate against any of those things, and you are fighting for fair and equitable working conditions for people all over the world, but then you start any relationship with your own future employees by reaffirming the same abusive power relationship that capitalist ownership has held over their workers for centuries.

You know what, I am not comfortable giving you my socio-economic status. I am not interested in telling you how I am doing financially, or giving you a glimpse into – what in this country – is my social and political capacity. The amount of money I make (or don't make) is personal to me and should not be coerced out of me by an employer. I understand why you could want to know this; so that you can pick a person or weigh several candidates based on how much it is going to cost you to employ them. Right there you have betrayed the entire purpose of your mission as an organization. You are now evaluating – and in fact discriminating against – me based on my willingness to give you intimate details about my life and doing it in a way that is manipulative and laced with power implications of an extortionary nature. You are a labor organization, you are fighting for the rights of individual laborers, yet you have just told me that I, the prospective employee, have to furnish you, the prospective employer, with certain personal details of my life that strengthen your position and control over me as a potential worker or else you will not consider me for a position in your company. During the worst economic downturn since the great depression, where people are dying for jobs, you are going to bludgeon prospective employees with a take it or leave it position of blatant and expropriative power that exemplifies the principle hold of capital and ownership over the rights of labor.  I am truly amazed.

I considered doing a number of things. A, walking away from the application on principle. But B, I believe in what the organization is trying to do. And then of course most importantly there is C: I have no job.  I have no home in a few weeks, and little prospect of alleviating any of this in a desirable manner.  In short, I am desperate.  Exactly the emotion that they and every other power hungry capitalist business is preying on regarding labor issues.  They hold the key and strings to power over us.  Force us to compete on only their terms: with a lack of power for the people.

So what do I do?  If I send it in with no salary history it won't be considered.  But I don't believe in reaffirming that power structure by giving them my salary history – even if I could rummage up the mish-mash of corporate, academic, retail, construction, football, and nannying work I've done and translate the currencies, dated exchange rates, and cost of living indexes – especially as they are supposed to be an organization fighting for MY rights as a worker.  Just like I never denote my race, sexual disposition, or any other categorization I do not agree with on anything.  No, I think I'm going to have to make a stand on this one, and hope that they respect it.  You want someone passionate about labor issues?  Someone that is going to fight for them?  Yeah, well I'm starting right now - with you!  That's the only way I could respect myself in the morning.  And frankly, there just isn't enough of that in the world.  We all stand for something bigger than ourselves. 

So you u want to know my salary history?  Well my salary history is that of an expropriated laborer. I have spent my whole life working for people, companies, and organizations that have tried to pay me as little as they possibly could in order to get the maximum amount of work out of me. I don't own any of the means of production; I've volunteered, I've worked and not been paid, I've interned, I've worked hourly, for tips and a for a salary, I've even been used by a university as an athletic beast of burden to fill their coffers. As with most all of us, it has never been enough. The struggles I have been through, the actual dollar amounts that I have obtained though are my business: my economic, my political, and my personal business. I do not want to compete in a rigged power struggle with you before I've even met you, and I don't want you to choose whether to interview, hire, or dismiss my application based on whether I am willing to divulge personal and political information about myself.   I want to do a job for you - with you.
 

I view it as my political and social right to tell you that for fear that my application could be discriminated against on socio-economic and political grounds that I chose not to divulge my personal information.  That this is my political stance on corporate power over workers, and I will definitively take a stand against a labor organization trying to exercise such excessive power.  I hope that as per your disclaimer you won't discriminate against me for exercising that political right, but it would be even better if you would step up to your mission statement and reverse this expropriative power structure between management and labor in our - and now your - world today. 

As is, while I now have serious reservations about this organization, I can only hope this is simply an isolated theoretical miss-step and that this note is the change needed.  Still though, I really would like to do this work and would surely entertain any offer the "Fair" Labor Association gave me.

I work because I believe in what I do, and I'd work for them because I believed in what they do. But their statement about salary histories tried to make work with them just about money, which everyone knows it is not. It is about making the lives of expropriated workers throughout the globe better, sadly though, that is going to have to start right here at home with our own mindsets.