That paper mill crew was a strange bunch to be sure. We used to speculate about what made us that way. Some thought it was working the swing shift, which kept us in a perpetual state of jet lag. Others believed it was because we had been together too long. Many of those guys went to school together, married each other's sisters, and then ended up working together for 20 or 30 years. Of course some of us were transplants from Down Below, but after a decade or so, you almost couldn't tell us from the indigenous natives. Then there were the guys who went Down Below to find work, or did a stitch in the military, and then came back home. The managers were mostly from somewhere else, and were rotated in and out of there every few years, but some of them ended up turning down promotions so they could stay right there. It doesn't necessarily take all kinds, but we had all kinds.
Proctor & Gamble has a long tradition of social engineering. They were one of the first manufacturing companies to provide retirement finds for their hourly employees, way back in the 19th Century. Most of their plants were non-union, and most of their employees were content to remain that way. The Cheboygan plant went union soon after Charmin bought it, and P&G inherited the union when they bought the plant from Charmin. I don't think the management was ever comfortable with that arrangement, believing that you shouldn't need a union when you worked for such a benevolent company. The guys who had worked in the auto plants for awhile came back with a different idea of what a union should be than the guys who didn't. The United Auto Workers Union was born in strife and violence, and many of its members never got over the mindset that the company was the enemy. Much of the paranoia about brainwashing likely came from the belief that they were trying to socially engineer us out of our union, and there was probably some truth to that. I took it more the way you said. It was a refreshing break from the daily grind, they were paying me to sit on my ass, and providing free coffee and donuts to boot. What's not to like?
I saw a thing on the TV news this evening about all those alleged police brutality incidents. They interviewed several experts who had different opinions about it. They brought out some of the same points that we have been discussing, and I thought that nobody read our blogs. A couple of them blamed the whole thing on poverty. One said we need to spend more money, and the other one said that we shouldn't throw good money after bad. He didn't say we shouldn't help those people, he just said that we need to come up with a plan that works instead of just dumping money on the problem. I have been treating poverty as a separate issue, and I'm still not so sure that it isn't. Why would being poor make you hate the police, or make the police hate you? I can see why it would make you hate the politicians, the bankers, and your boss at work, but the cops are just doing their job, or should be.
I don't think the cops are supposed to go around shooting people just because they find them annoying, and I think that most of them don't, most of the time. I can see how someone might crack under the stress of a job like that, but of course that doesn't make it right. Maybe they should rotate them in and out of the high crime neighborhood assignments periodically, like the military rotates people in and out of combat zones. Too much time on the front lines can ruin the best of soldiers.
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