Tag: Events of the Day

The city of Niagara Falls, NY has decided that it wants to engage children in its push for recycling. To this end, they have created a mascot for this effort.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet…Totes McGoats.

Yes, this is real.

(photo credit)

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The City of Dead Works

There is never any rest for me, the Ferryman of the Dead.

I pole my barge across the black waters and up to the pier. So many wait this time, many more than usual. I wonder what has happened, what event has sent me this many. “Come aboard,” I say. “I will take your coin for passage.” One by one they file past me, each handing to me the coin that they never knew they had. It is the coin which determines where they shall be taken to rest, its metal shaped and determined by life. The coins of these dead are gold, every one of them purest gold. Six thousand come aboard my barge, and each has passage for the farthest and greatest of destinations. In that moment I know that something truly dark has happened; the gold coins are always forged in moments of darkness. I am the Ferryman. I can give them no answers to what lies behind their haunted, questioning eyes. I can only take them on this, the last of all journeys.

When they are all aboard I take up the pole and push away from the pier. The barge always feels the same, no matter how many stand upon its decks. Whether six or six thousand, it is all the same to me. I guide us out onto the River Styx. Some of the people look worried, but there is no need for fear. This river can do them no harm. They are already dead.

This is to be a long journey, I know – it always is, to this destination. As I guide the barge through the black waters, I look on the faces of those who have come to me. As different as these people all look, they all have the same expressions of shock, disbelief, and withering sadness. Here is a man of business, talking into a cell phone. He is trying to call someone, anyone, who will tell him that it’s all a dream, that it didn’t happen, that he didn’t die in a blast of fire, smoke, glass and steel. There is a mother who is explaining to her daughter that they won’t be going to Disneyland after all. And there, a group of firemen stand together, realizing that soon they will meet all their brothers-in-arms who have gone into the infernos before them. So many now – colleagues once in business and now colleagues in death, people who have never before met but now have the gravest thing in common. As the current takes hold, I look back at the pier. There are more gathering there. There are always more. They will wait. Time does not exist for the dead.

“Please,” a young man says as he turns to me, “I have to go home to my daughters.”

“You are going home now,” I reply. “To the home where all eventually return.” Two black rocks slide past on either side, the rocks that mark the passage of the circling Styx.

“This can’t be,” a woman cries out. “My mother needs me.”

“She will be with you soon enough.”

“When?” Her voice pleads, and yet there is no solace that is mine to give.

“I cannot say,” I reply. “The Ferryman has no hand in Fate.”

The tears come then, tears from the six thousand that run over the gunwales and into the river which has been fed by tears for centuries. All tears are born in the River Styx.

“Where will you take us?” someone asks.

“To the place you are promised,” I answer. I recall the words of a poet: Will there be beds for all who seek? Yea, beds for all who come.

One our left we approach the Hills of the Damned, an endless stretch of shattered lands which reach away into the blackness. The waters echo with the cries of all those who have been taken to the Hills for the agony they have brought on the living. I consider the bag of six thousand gold coins, and I realize that I will have to journey to the Hills this day. There will be a person, perhaps more, who will pay me with a coin of black tin; but not on this journey. As the hills recede behind us, the unending cries of the damned become fainter and fainter until they are drowned out by the lapping of the waters upon the sides of the boat and the marker stones that we pass. The six thousand fall silent, each realizing that it is not a dream. I would offer solace, but as ever I cannot. I am the Ferryman.

We come around a particularly dark bend, and before us lies a very wide expanse of water, as if the Styx has become an ocean – which in some sense it probably has. And beyond that expanse are the thousands of twinkling lights that I have come to know so well. One man, a fireman, sees them too. “What is that?” he asks.

“It is the City of Dead Works,” I reply. The lights of the city glow on the horizon, and every one of the six thousand turns toward them as the Styx impels us onward. As we come ever closer to the city, the glittering lights reflect off the black water.

“I don’t understand,” someone else says. “The City of Dead Works?”

“Aye,” I reply. “Behold!”

From behind us, golden light: the Sun of the Dead is rising as it always does when the dead come near the City. Above us the firmament is turning purple, then blue; soon the light of the Sun will illuminate the City of Dead Works. As the sky lightens, the true scope of that city becomes plain: it stretches away into the land, farther than any eye could see. Not even the highest-soaring raven, cavorting in the breezes and zephyrs of the dead, could take it all in. It is bigger by far than any one city ever built by the hand of men, because it encompasses some part of all of them. Perhaps it is bigger than all of the cities ever built. Now the sun’s first rays come up behind us, and the first buildings can be seen down by the water.

“That one looks Egyptian,” a woman says.

“The Great Library of Alexandria,” I tell her. “Once the greatest repository of learning the world had ever seen, now only a memory to the living and a reality only to the dead.”

A man points to a building high upon a rock. I nod.

“The Temple of Solomon,” I say.

“There are ships in the harbor,” says another. Thus for him I name the ships: Arizona, Indianapolis, Lusitania, Bismarck, Wilhelm Gustloff, Cap Arcona. And many, many others. I scan over the impossibly vast city and spot Dresden, as it was; and beside it the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And how many smaller villages, tucked into the hills beyond the City? None can say. The Sun of the Dead shines upon those hills now, and the great stone statues in the likeness of Siddhartha Gautama.

“I don’t understand,” a young man says. “Why this City? Why here?”

I only shake my head as we continue to float by the City. I do not point out the fairly small, nondescript office building that sits near the water. It is not a particularly remarkable building; nor was it, really, until the fuse was lit. The six thousand almost don’t recognize it.

Almost.

Not one word is uttered as we slide past the Alfred Murrah Federal Building. Then we turn away from the City of Dead Works, and head again down the waters of the Styx toward distant hills and the place where these people will join their brethren.

“Who lives in that city?” It is a priest in a fireman’s coat.

“No one lives there,” I tell him. “The City of Dead Works is not for people. It is for the buildings and the ships. It is for the books and the music, the sculptures and the paintings which are gone forever. It is for everything destroyed by craven people in the name of foolish wars, for everything judged forfeit in the face of transitory desires.”

The Styx takes us into the Golden Hills. Soon we will be there, and the six thousand will go where they belong. And then the Styx will complete its circle, taking me back to the pier where more dead await.

“We will be there soon,” I say. “Soon we will be at the Elysian Fields, where all heroes go – for that is what you all are. It is what you have bought with your lives, with the shaping of your coins into gold.” No one replies. We near the last bend now, and before us lie the Elysian Fields, where peace reigns and where heroes dwell; where all is light and voices are always raised in song. The Sun of the Dead shines warmly on Elysium.

But they do not see it. They, the six thousand, all gaze back behind us upon the City of Dead Works. It will soon be behind us forever as we round the last bend of the River Styx into Elysium. I know they all need one last look upon that City, and I do not grudge them that. For myself, I do not look back; the eyes of the Ferryman are ever forward. But I know. I know that the City of Dead Works is different now. I know that it has changed. I know that the people who come with me now to Elysium, the dead around me, look back on the two soaring towers of steel that now rise above the City where there had been no towers before.

I know these things.

I am the Ferryman of the Dead.

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Below the jump: some thoughts on the minimum wage. Long and liberal, so beware.

(Note on structure for this post: there is no real “through-line” in terms of my “argument” here. This really is a collection of thoughts, not all of them as closely-intertwined as others.)

After a lot of protesting and virtual “striking”, fast food workers have won a number of victories, most notably the State of New York recommending a raise in the minimum wage in their industry to $15 an hour. Now, there are some provisos that get overlooked in commentary on this: first, that wage is to be phased in over six years, so nobody’s going to be making $15 an hour for making cheeseburgers until 2021, and second, the wage increase only applies to businesses over a certain size threshold (something like thirty locations). So this will hit the McDonald’s and Burger Kings and Subways of the world, but not the small local chains like Tom Wahl’s and Ted’s Hot Dogs.

But it’s a start.

Random thoughts, then:

:: Good for them. I am happy for any worker who benefits from this. I am a firm believer that anything that helps people at the lower end of the economic pool rise up a bit is a good thing.

:: I am also thrilled at the prospect that maybe the pendulum is starting to swing in this country away from what we’ve made our central core of economic priorities since roughly 1980. Our prevailing notion regarding the economy has been to embrace “trickle down”, and we’ve spent nearly 40 years cutting taxes and regulations in an effort to create an economy where virtually all the gains, all the big benefits, all the money are relentlessly funneled to the top. I hope that this minimum wage increase for a specific industry is just the start of something.

:: Of course, for this to be the start of something – the beginning of a swing back toward an economic model where benefits are focused more on the middle and bottom than relentlessly funneled to the top – an awful lot of people have to start looking at things differently. Sadly, this seems to include a lot of people who are in the middle and bottom of the pool. I’m referring here to the constant undercurrent of resentment people seem to feel toward others who are doing better than they are.

We’re all familiar with the concept of “keeping up with the Joneses”, but what I’m noticing now is a kind of insidious reversal of that concept. We all seem to have fewer Joneses with whom we feel we need to keep up, and we feel a constant sense that our grip on what we have is…well, if not exactly weakening, then there’s a sense that what we have could be ripped from our grasp at any moment. So we’re less worried about “keeping up with the Joneses”, and more worried about “keeping ahead of the Smiths”. Each concept is harmful in its own way, but I think the latter might be more dangerous.

“Keeping ahead of the Smiths” leads to jealousy and envy. It leads to literal resentment of when someone else has something that we feel they don’t deserve, and it seems to be an even stronger impulse when it’s something we don’t have that they suddenly do. I don’t know where or when this odd impulse became so engrained in the American psyche, but I definitely believe it’s there. I see this impulse at work whenever voters spread vicious rhetoric about how awful public school teachers are to make the money they make, and I certainly see it at work now.

“Maybe I should go apply at McDonald’s,” I hear a lot these days. Or “Gee, I’ve never made fifteen bucks an hour.” The latter is often coupled with a description of the jobs one has done, obviously intended to make clear that my work should pay more than theirs. And these sentiments aren’t brand new, either, born of shock that burgerflippers (said with appropriate voice filled with disdain) are going to make that kind of money. I once heard a counter clerk at a store complain bitterly that her husband made twice what she did at his union job, even though all he did was [insert mential task here]. I find such sentiments irritating, because first of all, I myself have never been angry that someone else makes more than me at a certain job.

Seriously, I’ve never understood that point. These things are inherently unfair. Minimum wage when I started working at my very first summer job, when I was 17 years old, was $3.35 an hour. It went up to $5.25 a few years later, and there it stayed for a good, long time. When I started moving into management with Pizza Hut, the highest wage I attained was somewhere around $6.50 an hour. So what?

Also, I remember what happened every time the minimum wage went up. The already-existing employees who were making less than the new minimum would get brought up to the new minimum, while employees already above the minimum would get a raise of some sort. However, this always resulted in complaints: “Why am I only getting a raise of fifty cents an hour? I’m making a buck fifty more than minimum now, and after this I’ll only be making seventy-five cents more!” These arguments always struck me as odd. Your pay was going up, wasn’t it? Did it really matter that you stayed ahead of the minimum by the same margin as before? Was “keeping ahead of the Smiths” really that important?

Ultimately, though, this whole issue reveals just how completely Labor in this country has allowed itself to be trampled, and how thoroughly everyone, from the cashier at Home Depot all the way up, has bought into the concept that our companies must be willing to pay no more than what they determine we are worth. That is mind-boggling to me. We’ve completely bought into the idea that the key economic factor holding everyone back from ultimate prosperity is taxes. Every time a tax increase is proposed, well, get ready for some fur to fly. I invariably hear commentary from someone saying “I haven’t had a raise in three years, but now I gotta pay more in taxes!” Setting aside the amount of the new tax levy itself, doesn’t it ever occur to anyone to say, “Hey! How come I haven’t had a raise in three years?”

To my way of thinking, as I look at the numbers that demonstrate a wildly growing level of inequality in America, our economic self-perception is seriously out of whack. We have bought completely into the notion that the Free Markets are the best engine for all this, and never mind that throughout history the most “Free Market”-dedicated eras resulted in massive inequality of the type we’re seeing now. We have bought completely into the idea that the market will eventually bring its benefits upon us, and that it’s taxes that are the big problem. After nearly forty years of unending tax-cutting and deregulating, however, all we have to show for it is wages that are stuck in neutral and money flowing ever, ever, ever upward in a pattern that can only be described as redistributive (albeit in the exact opposite way that that term is usually deployed by libertarian-types). The biggest problem most Americans face, economically, is not what the government is taking out of our paychecks. It is what our employers are not putting into them in the first place.

So why, then, so much resentment toward a group of workers who banded together and through various means of legal redress seem to have won a kind of victory for themselves? Why are so many people so eager to see in this another screwing of themselves by the system, instead of an example of what might be done elsewhere? If you’re so convinced that your line of work is deserving of better pay, than why not band together and do your own self-advocation?

Well, I’m not really sure. Part of it, I suppose, has to do with America’s infatuation with the Individual, and the idea that we are singularly capable of, and ultimately responsible for, achieving things. That’s probably at least partly why I hear so much “I never made fifteen bucks, why should they?” My answer to that is, “Why didn’t you, and why shouldn’t they?” That’s why I always hear so much condemnation of public schoolteachers, and it’s also why we always manage to denigrate factory workers for striking for more money (or for keeping the money they make) even while we complain about the sorry state of American manufacturing.

We do too much worrying in this country of keeping up with the Joneses and ahead of the Smiths. There’s this creepy undercurrent of American thought that tells us that someone doing better than we are really shouldn’t be, and that’s a pretty lousy way to look at life. Maybe we should stop viewing our lives through the prism of how the Joneses and Smiths are doing, and maybe start admitting that if the Joneses and Smiths all do well, maybe it will help us.

:: Side issue: I’ve also seen some rejoinders along the lines that now companies will simply automate more. There’s a picture-meme-thing going around Facebook of what is apparently a McDonald’s someplace where there are no order takers, just a bank of self-order kiosks. “See! They’ll just replace you with machines! Maybe you should have been happy with your $7.25 an hour!!!”

This is simply dumb, of course. Anyone who thinks that such automation isn’t coming down the pike already, because McDonald’s is perfectly happy to pay $7.25 but feels their hand is forced at $15, is simply delusional. And that brings up my biggest worry for the future, which just manages to push Global Warming into the second spot.

Eventually, there simply isn’t going to be enough work for humans to do. We are going to get so good at automating things that there simply will not be enough jobs to be filled by humans. I am nowhere near good enough a futurist, in terms of imagination, to see what kind of society this will lead us to create, but I truly believe that our entire economic way of life, based on work, is going to end somehow. Either we’ll start inventing work, literal “busy work”, just to prop up the idea that we’re all supposed to work jobs for money and then buy the stuff we need, or we’ll move into some sort of post-work economy. I have no idea what that’s going to look like, and the notion of that transition scares me, because it doesn’t seem to me that we make such transitions easily.

It will also be interesting to see what happens specifically to the American psyche once we start settling into a post-work world, when there isn’t enough work to go around. Our country is built to what often seems to me an absurd degree on the idea that it’s our work that makes us who we are. Americans work harder for less, and take less time off than anybody else, and somehow we’ve elevated that aspect of our character to a particular spot of pride. This always strikes me as deeply odd, but I don’t think we’re going to shake off that “Work! Work! WORK!” mentality of ours, in which we’re still expected to be available and answer e-mails on the few vacations we take, and in which we wear the number of hours we work over 40 as a badge of honor, until the ongoing march of technological innovation forces us to do so.

This is another reason why I reject Libertarianism so strenuously. In a world where so much of the work is automated that an ever-shrinking number of people are paid to do what’s left, the idea that the unfettered functioning of a market will be the best way to accomplish anything at all is downright silly. It’s also for that reason that I think that things like single-payer healthcare are going to have to happen, eventually. We won’t have a choice in the matter, if we want people to have healthcare. (And yes, we will want people to have healthcare.)

:: By the way, “hard work” has entirely too strong a grip on our collective imagination. It’s utterly absurd that the United States is one of just a handful of countries in the world, and virtually alone amongst large industrial countries, that doesn’t mandate paid vacation time. Other countries that are not the most affluent nation in the history of the planet have made this happen, but somehow we always manage to claim poverty when the idea is floated here.

:: In fact, this is yet another example of our ongoing national failure to allow the experiences of other countries to inform our own policy choices. Other countries have figured out how to have better healthcare for all citizens than we provide, and pay less to do it; other countries have figured out how to have a significantly higher minimum wage than we do, and yet not have burgers cost the equivalent of twenty bucks; other countries have figured out how to have better national transportation and better this and better that. We’re always told that these things can’t possibly work here, for reasons that never make any sense to me; the USA simply cannot be an outlier on everything, so much so that ideas that work elsewhere are doomed to failure here. And I’m roundly sick to death of any argument against something that boils down to some odd, abstract, almost-metaphysical appeal to “freedom”.

:: Every time some kind of regulation like this comes along, companies and industry groups start screaming “Poverty!” and trotting out the exact same objections. It will destroy their industry, it will destroy jobs, it will crush entire economies in its wake. We hear this every single time the minimum wage is increased at all. We heard this when the ADA was passed. We heard it when the ACA was passed. Hell, we heard it from restaurant and bar owners as cities and states nationwide passed rigorous anti-smoking laws, and we heard it from the direct marketing people when the government created its Do Not Call List. We hear this objections every time out, and never do they come true. At all. So I will not be listening to any such protestations in the future. Business America has gone to that well a few too many times for me.

Of course, there will be some business closures that are cited as examples why this matter of policy is a bad idea. But guess what? There are always business closures – or, at least, business decisions that adversely affect consumers or employees – that are blamed on some new policy or other, such as how every medical insurance company has been able, the last few years, to cite the ACA for raising prices. My general view is that companies are going to do what they plan to do anyway, and if some government regulation comes down the pike that they can blame, so be it.

So yes, McDonald’s may decide that because of this wage increase, locations that have been underperforming will be closed. In general, though, those locations were likely doomed anyway.

A couple of links: Local blogger Alan Bendenko discussed this subject on a local podcast last week, and here’s a wealthy person who says that the pitchforks are coming. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. It’s hard not seeing people banding together to fight for better pay as a warning shot, though.

(I’m deactivating comments to this post, by the way.)

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This post seems to be having a viral moment, and deservedly so. It’s an elegy for an old tree.

People never had trouble finding our house.
“It’s the one with the giant maple in front,” I’d say, “the one with the tire swing.”
That was enough. They’d see the tree, massive, 60 feet tall and almost as wide, then behind is, hiding, our 1905 farmhouse.
The tree was one of the oldest in Northbrook: easily 125 years old, and was perhaps the best feature about our place. A living link to the 19th century.
“I bought the tree,” I’d tell visitors, “and the house came with it.”

Read the whole thing. It’s a lovely piece of writing; elegiac and affirming at the same time.

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A post about gay marriage, after the break….

So we’re over a week since the Supreme Court weighed in and made it legal nationwide for gays to marry, and the repercussions are still…repercussing. Some on the right are calling for the people in favor to be magnanimous in victory and nice to those poor folks who lost the case, which strikes me as a bit twee. This isn’t the end of a playoff series in the NHL, where the two teams line up for a series of handshakes before one team gets ready for its next round in the playoffs and the other just goes home for the summer. This was a deeply serious struggle that took many, many, many years to come to this point, and it was a struggle that has seen gays literally demonized, literally killed and jailed for their beliefs and desires to live their lives. Hearing people on the right crying out “Please be nice to us now that you’ve won” don’t do much for me when I remember what happened to Matthew Shepard and Alan Turing.

And those cries of “Be nice to us, now” sure as hell don’t do much for me when I go on Facebook and see this:

The spilling of blood.

The person who posted this seems to be literally calling for some kind of civil and religious war to get things back to the “way they should be”, with gays firmly shoved back in the closet so we don’t have to know about them at all while they live their disgusting, immoral, hedonistic lives.

The spilling of blood.

This makes me want to ask a bunch of questions.

We’ve already spilled blood on this. Shepard, for instance. Turing. Every gay person who died of AIDS while Ronald Reagan ignored the problem. (And let’s not pretend those aren’t the same thing. It all comes together. It’s all about treating gays as what they are: people.)

Whose blood needs to be spilled?

Will there be Christian fundamentalist suicide bombers, detonating themselves in the middle of gay weddings?

Will there be states attempting secession again, this time over their “right” to subjugate and dehumanize another group of people?

Will some town or county or state become so defiant that the President is forced to deploy the National Guard to escort gays to their own weddings? Will those National Guardsmen be fired upon?

Are we calling for the assassination of the five Supreme Court justices who voted this way? If so, why stop there? Before the ruling, gay marriage was legal in many states because of decisions in lower courts. Are those judges to be placed against the execution wall? What about the states where marriage was legalized through legislative action? Should every person who ever cast a vote in favor of gay marriage in any state legislature be placed against the same wall?

Whose blood will be spilled? Where, and why? And will you be willing to spill your blood for this noble cause?

And if so, will you for the love of God think about what that says?


Then there are my other questions, which mainly revolve around this one: WHY IS THIS SO BIG A DEAL TO YOU???


Does the Bible say negative things about homosexuality? It does seem to…but there’s something about the way it says it, isn’t there? It’s not entirely clear that the writers of those ancient texts are referring to quite the same thing that we are, in our day. If God feels so strongly about homosexuality and “marriage equals one man and one woman”, you’d think he would have managed to get that into that list of Commandments. Instead, it gets relegated to other parts of the Bible, along with all manner of other stuff that we willingly ignore.

So why is homosexuality in general, and gay marriage in particular, so important? What makes this prohibition from Leviticus the one that must be obeyed unto death, up to and including the spilling of blood? Why this, and not the eating of shellfish or getting tattoos or Wal-Mart being open on Sunday or the bit about how if your teenager is rebellious the proper thing to do is drag her outside so your neighbors can stone her?

What is so awful about this law in a book full of laws you completely ignore that it must be obeyed to the point of overruling those Ten Commandments that seem to be the things God really really really wants us to not be doing?

“We must be ready to spill blood in order to prevent people from loving in a way that stands in opposition to my selective reading of a text written thousands of years ago by an agrarian people in a desert country on the other side of the world, all because of my personal belief that said text was inspired by God.”

That may be the single craziest sentence I have ever written. And that’s saying something.

(Comments are off for this post.)

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