Bitching about the
pension that is forty percent less if he retires at fifty and the 401k on top
he cannot take until sixty-five. I tell
him the revolution is coming in 2025.
Too many sellers, my generation has no money to buy, stock market is
going to crash. He says, “Well I don’t
have any money in the stock market.”
He says, “I
sympathize for your generation, but what can I do. Do you try to change something that cannot be
changed or just go on and live your life?
I went out to dinner with my wife the other night, probably going to put
a hundred and twenty-five dollars down.
We pass a bum on the street and I think about what we are going to eat
tonight and what that would be compared to his daily bread.”
His wife says, “He
probably got himself into that.” He
says, “You’re probably right.” He tells
me, “Steak and lamb tastes good.” He
says, “If you go into a casino and put money down you have to think of it as
entertainment like when I drop $250 to go to an LSU football game. I know a guy who may lose $10,000 at the casino
in a single night. To him that’s nothing,
as long as you think about it like that it’s all right.”
I say, “Any form
of gambling is an insult to ration and an affront to human intelligence.” I say, “Obama may not be that different with
his drones, surveillance prism and the one-party system, but at least he’s not
as brazen as the other side. That
sentiment of revolution that elected him, it is not close to dead. It’s coming through the internet. Anonymous is empowered and we are not going away.”
His wife comes by
my daughter, my mother and I and happens to utter the word, “Shit.” Another scorns the curse. His wife says, “Well she’s got to learn some
time. Her daddy’s music has those
words. I know I have heard it in his
car. It’s alright we are all going to
heaven.” His wife walks away. I tell my mother over my daughter’s ears, “I
was more concerned with the word heaven.”
He asks again
before the oven beeps for the third time as lunch has been ready, “What can I do?” I say, “You can first elect the volition of
your mind to pay attention. Be aware of
those around you in need. The extreme of
saving or ignoring the real world is an absolutists’ damnation.”
“I have a friend
in nursing school in debt, trying to go back to school, because her first
degree is fruitless. I have another with
three kids and can code like a software samurai; he finally found a job he is
holding onto like oxygenated blood to stay off state-assistance to make rent,
food, and student loan payments. A
lawyer hung up in an apartment clerking for a judge unsure what happens
next. The smartest guy I know is a
Federal public defender getting his budget cut.
A marketing major, the state forbids his rights like it is still 1864,
sells used cars. Another is in the
marines because his English degree got him airfare without a passport to
deserts to help the non-degreed soldiers learn how not to die. Others aborted their own children because
$200,000 to get to eighteen when you do not have rent makes more sense.
Me I have seen the
entrails of Enron ripped open and set corporate America like a smut film for
working class heroes. I write and keep
my eyes and my principles in attention to fight with the most dangerous weapons
of the revolution, ideas to help explain to people like you and like me how we are
all interconnected. I would rather live
only ten years, then spend one day believing the indolent apathy of cannibalizing
these principles.”
He says, “My wife
use to sell sugar to Wal-Mart at the mill.
She told them look at our books it costs us $2.25 a pound. We have to pay Bob to run the plant, Steve to
manage operations, Susan to account for the numbers.” Wal-Mart says, “Sell it to me for $2.15 and I
don’t give a fuck about Bob, Steve or Susan, contract them out.” He says, “The mill wanted to do the right
thing, but if you are not in the shelf at Wal-Mart then you don’t exist.” He says, “But we still shop at SAM’s club.”
He says, “Think of
the older generation of what they say.
You have no idea. Problems, you
call this crap problems, you are complaining.
Two cars in the driveway, they would say you’re rich.”
I say, “Well at
least they could have kids.” I say, “Have you ever seen the first five
minutes of the movie Idiocracy; well
it is become true. Most friends I know
with a degree and a decent chance are waiting to have kids and fewer if
any. The people with no shot at least
they got a little bit of love and a gangly family tree.
Try and support a
livable middle class wage rather than worrying about everybody getting ‘mine.’ That’s most people. The ‘most people’ you complain about leaching
aren’t on government assistance. We’re
just trying to do the best with what we got; getting paid shit because health
care and retirement are luxury goods.
I listen to Woody
Guthrie just about every day and the only true trickle down I ever tasted was
to Dylan and Springsteen and hearing Community Records run through my brother
in a modern day Occupy to his dust bowl.
I hear Woody sing about Hitler and see my friends off to
Afghanistan. Stand in line in New York
town one day; we saw two towers fall just like you. We sent the bodies to Bush’s crusade for his
father. Yeah we haven’t a clue what it
was like. Vietnam vets and no respect
desert suicide PTSD under the Tom Joad overpass. ”
Somehow Wal-Mart’s
stock price got that too in that fucking yellow smile grinning at the short-run
versus the long. Yeah, this land is my
land. This land is your land with the Macondo
blowing up in the gulf and kindergarten funerals. Katrina
ripped the roof off my home. Behind a
levee of time I see government retirees bask in their fifties and Republicans
bitch about poor people inside a bubble.”
Well I see, if ain’t
got the Do-re-mi,
You god damn sad
bastards who have no clue what you can do, what did teacher say,
“Pay attention.”
“Well I am just a
lonesome traveler. The Great historical
Bum.
Highly educated
from history I have come.
I built the Rock
of Ages, ‘was in the Year of One
And that was about
the biggest thing that man had ever done.”
“I’d better quit
my talking, ‘cause I told you all I know,
But please
remember, pardner, wherever you may go.
The people are
building a peaceful world, and when the job is done
That’ll be the
biggest thing that man has ever done.”
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