Despite my constantly referring to your ilk, I am actually more of an
ilk person than you are in that I identify more with my ilk than you do
with yours, I guess part of the reason for that is that it is the ilks
who get things done, who pass the bills and make the laws. You and I
can flap our jaws till kingdom come, and nothing will get done. If we
want it done we have to get our ilks to do it. Maybe it won't be
something the ilks had in mind, and maybe they will try to do it, but
won't be successful because the other ilk is too strong.
But a man ought to have a plan, right? Even if there is no chance it
will ever happen, he still ought to have a plan, because otherwise he is
like one of those guys who never votes and then complains about the
gummint. He oughta have a plan because when he has been ranting for the
last three beers and boring the hell out of the guys on either side of
his stool, and one of them finally says, "OK Buddy, what's your plan,"
he oughta have something more to say, "Fuck all the assholes."
See then the guys would submit his plan to the crucible and tinker with
it until it was logically sound and then they could present it to their
ilk, who would slap their foreheads and declare "By gum, that is a
crackerjack plan," and they'd write it up, and send it to their
committee, and those guys would tinker with it, and then they'd have to
try to get it past the other ilk, who would attach amendments and
whatever and finally there would be something they would agree with and
that's how the Fuck All The Assholes bill became law.
Just kidding, sort of. Anyway our two plans are surprisingly similar. I
would differ a bit on your plan for the poor to work on highways
because that job is already being done by highway workers so you would
just be taking away their jobs, and then you would have to pay the poor,
so it's not like you would be saving any money, and do you really want
to drive your streak of lightning car along highways built by people who
were forced to build it, and maybe took a shortcut here and there so
they could get home early?
Hey, I read a science fiction story once where machines are doing
everything and there is nothing left for people to do, and it makes this
guy just feel so useless and depressed, and then he hears about this
job. All this machinery that is doing everything is clanking around all
day, and its screws get loose, and they need to be tightened. Well
it's not much of a job, just walking around with a screwdriver and
tightening things, but it's something that needs to be done, and it
brings a spring to his step.
So delighted is he, and his wife, who doesn't have to put up with a
sulking useless bum all day, that they have a little party and invite
their best pals, Sue and Stu, and they eat and they drink, but before it
gets too late they have to get up and go because Stu has to work in the
morning. Our hero is pleased, his pal, Stu, has a job too. When
pressed for details, Stu tells him that he is on the loosening crew.
I like makework, not something as stupid as in that story, but something
that is modestly useful, picking up papers on the street, some kind of
labor intensive work on our infrastructure. Just as you are breaking
with your ilk by wanting to hire the poor, I am going to break with my
ilk by wanting to bully them a little.
You know some of the poor do make a spectacle of themselves when you
want them to do some kind of work for their supper and lodging. This is
slavery, I have heard them complain, but then everybody who works for
pay is a slave, and so what?
I was talking to a friend who worked with the poor many years ago, and
she was saying that one problem with getting poor people jobs is that
they were just not in the habit of working, of getting up every weekday
and going to work. They would work a couple days and then take a day
or two off. They would show up a few hours late and think what's the
fuss? They showed up didn't they?
I don't know how much work you get out of people who have to show up,
but I think it's a start, and I think I will leave The Plan there for
this morning.
The way I remember what I learned in school was that their were three
main races, the white, the yellow, and the black, but they weren't
really races since they could interbreed, and because they could
interbreed most people were a mixture of them. Nordics was more of a
type within the white 'race,' blonde hair and blue eyes and long faces I
think, and maybe something about their noses, maybe snubby because of
the cold. Slavic is just a language group, physically no different than
those awful Germans who when they went uninvited into Poland found guys
who looked just like Germans, and if their earlobes measured just right
they could become part of the Reich. Crazy stuff, Man.
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