brainwashing at the mill

I wonder if that Hertz guy had kids, and I wonder what they thought about him.

The idea of confiscating inheritance wouldn't have worked out so well for me.  I might still be subbing.  But as a good liberal I am always in favor of soaking the rich.  I don't know how exactly we would enforce it, those rich guys have those smart sneaky lawyers and what about the family farm and stuff like that, and I don't know how the money would come out.

And even if those things could be figured out, there is the problem, as you pointed out, of the guy coming to us ants hat in hand (why hat in hand?  Oh like a beggar, I could have figured that out myself, if google hadn't been so near at hand) and a pocket full of bad lottery tickets, whining, but what about my kids? 

See that's the beauty of social security, the gummint just takes it out of your paycheck and you don't even see it.  And then you can't have it until you are old, and if you die before that, tough shit.  And then unlike those lottery winners, you cannot get it in a lump sum, you get so much once a month, and if you come hat in hand to the ants after blowing this month's check at the track, the ants just tell you not to do that next month.

Well I suppose you could give out that Hertz windfall once a month, although that wouldn't amount to much.  And of course we want the grasshopper to spend it on the right things like food, and housing. and healthcare and his kids.  As you pointed out, we could make the guy go to classes to teach him how to spend his money, but as you also pointed out, he would probably spend the whole class looking for an inkwell into which to dip Peggy from accounting's pigtail. 

Well what if we force him to spend his money on the right things?  What if we just took the money from his windfall and spent it on the right things for him, the food, the housing, the healthcare, education for his kids, without him ever seeing the money?  Wait a minute isn't that socialism?  You betcha.

I wonder about  those classes the mill gave its employees.  Particularly I wonder why your fellow millers thought of it as brainwashing.  How tiny were their brains that they could be washed by sitting in a lecture hall for like an hour a month?  There are those motivational speakers who ply all these rhetorical tricks to convince you of something, and of course there are the preachers and the politicians.  I could see the company trying to give you some speech that would get more work out of you, but cognitive dissonance sounds a little esoteric.  So what were these classes the mill gave you?  And why were your fellow millers so offended by it?  Didn't the company pay for your time?  Isn't a boring lecture better than actually working?  Well maybe not, but couldn't you sneak a nap?

I think the cops have long been beating up on the black community.  Some of it is surely racist because some people are racist and some of those people are cops.  Speaking of racism, I remember it being as common as being a White Sox fan back in Gage Park, but now in my rarefied downtown community I seldom come across it, but I still do every now and then.  I see some vile racist crap on fb, that surprises me in this day and age.

Anyway racism aside, the black community is also a convenient place to beat up on people because they are not likely to hire fancy lawyers.  I think it has always happened a lot.  Why this sudden eruption right now about something that has been going on for years, I don't know.

And there is all this talk about we need to have a national conversation about race, and how many of those have we had?  I think we all know where we stand.  And I hear some talk from my ilk about how these riots are like a good thing, about how nobody listens to nonviolence so violence is the way to go, and I think that is a big load of shit.  Burning down the local Taco Bell means you now have no nachos belle grande in your neighborhood, and you lose whatever jobs it provided, and it will give other fastfoods pause before they move into your hood, and it will harden white hearts and make it harder for you to get your political demands. 

I do think these body cams are a great idea.