Yesterday meant the end of shared work for me while on standby. I had the option to remain on standby to collect emergency unemployment due to COVID and so I took it as did many of my fellow co-workers. I have been assured that there will be no negative penalty for this, but should that prove not to be the case, I am going to assume I still made the right choice. I think there has been a shift in consciousness in the world now – the power is not at the top, and it never has been.

It should matter to all of us that the wealth in this country is created at the bottom and that is where the power really resides – we just need to leverage it. The ivory towers need to fall and businesses that can’t or won’t compensate their workers properly especially in a crisis need to crumble into memory. They don’t deserve our labor or our dollars. There are other options. The fact that it has taken Amazon this long to stop being tone deaf in Seattle and New York means they deserve to see a severe drop in revenue. That’s one example, and I’m sure many have others. We need to listen to them all.

I never want to hear the talk again about people working “certain jobs” deserving not to make enough to live. Not when those are the very industries we’re relying on for survival as. a. species. If a job exists, the wage should be livable for the locality. The fact that minimum wage or even above minimum wage is not enough at full-time wages to support a house, a family, and investments as well as shopping in the marketing means that capitalism has become debt-dependent and is going to continue to fail under such a weight. It is also ethically unconscionable. We all deserve better than to be fed to the Dow-Jones.

Burn the yachts in the harbors. Raid the corporate coffers. Cut the oligarchy with their shiny crowns off at the knees. Be Americans again, like we were at the start. And let’s start caring for each other as communities rather than using warm bodies for rungs on a ladder to one day kiss those blood-stained jeweled hands.