What’s up all you Internet people out there? It’s Friday night and time for another blog from mine truly. I’m not sure why “Yours truly” is supposed to mean “me”. In any case, I’m writing this one on the fly again, but I kinda know what I want to talk about. And I’ve got some old school Alice In Chains playing so let’s see where that takes me.
So it’s 9/11, and fittingly, the sky was filled with smoke today. Thankfully it wasn’t from a terrorist attack. Just some record setting forest fires, which is probably actually a more serious issue? I mean, despite what the State Department says, you can negotiate with a terrorist a lot easier than you can negotiate with nature once she gets tired of your shit. But they’re both just examples of how history will come back around and bite you in the ass. You see, I must confess that I never really took 9-11 personally. I feel like a lot of Americans took that shit personally. Like it was done to them. I’m not saying I wasn’t upset about it. I just never felt like it was done to me, or anyone like me. It was done to a bunch of business criminals and war criminals. It was done to capitalism and the military industrial complex. I don’t want shit to do with any of those people. I know some truly innocent people got caught up in shit too. I do feel sad for the cleaning staff and service workers. It’s sad that capitalism put them in that position. I’d certainly hate to go out making some tech-bro a sandwich.. And I certainly don’t condone terrorism by any means. Seriously, don’t do that shit. It’s counterproductive, and you mostly just hurt a lot of people who never did shit to anyone. I just think if we paid more attention to why people co shit like that, we can change the way we do things in ways that might make people feel less inclined to kamikaze a skyscraper. I mean, I’ve been pretty pissed in my life, but it’s never occurred to me to do some shit like that. So I figure you’ve gotta be reeeeeaaally pissed at somebody to do some shit like that. That’s all I’m saying, I think.
The other big day this week was Labor Day. Labor day was created by American oligarchs when they agreed that they had to give their workers a holiday, it just couldn’t be an international one. Because if workers actually came together across the world, they might realize that they all had more in common with each other than they do with their rulers. So they invented Labor Day, even though international workers day already existed, and was started in America. So we get Labor day. But of course nobody is actually obligated to give employees a day off or even pay them extra. So for a lot of workers it’s just another day where they can’t get mail. For the rest it’s a day to get drunk and barbecue. Seems to be the crowning achievement of the labor movement in this country. They let us work for 40 hours a week with a few Mondays off a year. This was back when the working class actually had some power in this country.. Now the working class is kind of fucked, and it’s because the working class back then didn’t capitalize on the power they did have. They could have taken all the money they were making and pooled it together to build worker co-ops, and bought out the factories they worked in. But of course that didn’t happen. For one thing they were all bought off by consumer capitalism by then, but they also didn’t really want to work with black people. They didn’t want them in their unions and they certainly didn’t want to live around them. So they all bought nice cars and houses in the suburbs as soon as they could = and watched the cities they abandoned decay on their fancy new television sets.. Then what happens? Gradually these companies start cutting production, laying people off, then moving their factories to other countries. Now a lot of jobs are gone and probably never coming back. And while it’s ultimately the greedy rich fucks who we need to hold responsible, the white working class has a lot to answer for. And of course nothing that happened in the past is the fault of anyone alive today, it is something that has to be dealt with if there's any hope of uniting the 99%.
Sadly we’re largely a nation of checkers players. Not many people seem to see the big picture. About 1%, or really even.01% of us are playing chess, and using the rest of us as pieces. It seems difficult for a lot of people to see the big picture, But one way to start is to take stock of what’s really important in life. Whatever doesn’t fit into that category,, say “Fuck it.” before it fucks you.