In 2007, when I began writing in blogs, it was always when I was in my cubicle, in Chicago, on the clock. I felt guilty and impulsive then, but my muses became a little bit trained to show up – around 10 a.m. The impulse began looking a little methodical. It became a little scheduled. A little imperative. When I find, in the present, that I’ve shaved off a couple hours of paid time to keep as my own, for life admin or asking my kids about their days, a chant within me feels no remorse. Within me is a shout, “PAY MOTHERS!”
Two years ago, I wrote here about exhaustion and capitalism, oppression and uprising, etc. My perspective from then now feels naïve and green, looking back. The tiredness The Collective (“us,” “we,” “you”) feels is now chronic. We krunked tired. It reminds me of the new mothering years, when your depletion is so total it becomes a cloud in which you live, work and breathe. At times absurd, often frustrating, so tired that losing your keys causes a momentary collapse. You just can’t being this multi-brained, and you fall into a heap, weeping over the sanity that once blessed you but cannot grow in the new conditions your find yourself.
“PAY BLACK WOMEN” was a chant that I often heard, obeyed, and repeated two years ago.
“PAY ME.” We unionize, slowly the movement of workers is putting a collective foot down to say we will go no further backwards. But the workers now produce nothing. It is so curious to me. We are the commodity. Our service, our attitudes, attentiveness, appearance, we have become the product, the face. As a side note, I love watching folks who don’t get it when they balk at the resistance some younger workers have to being the product the makers sell. I relish their complaints of poor service, appearance, attitudes. It stirs a great cauldron of mirth within me. And I don’t mind the time spent waiting either. Life is too fast anyway.
The products we must represent are now made too far away to carry lasting meaning and with the manufactured move away went our stable futures. The sellers of the goods are too humongous and masterful now. They can barely be seen. Who even owns or started Target? (It’s a hypothetical question.) We live inside a Magic Eye picture now. American society: both the privileged viewer, standing back, lazily waiting to be impressed (“Them), and the mass of splotches, the customer service representatives, the team members, the partners (“Us”) hiding a bigger picture of Corporate Rights (“America,” “Liberty,” “Justice”) over individual ones.
We’ve got too tired. And yet, we’ve gotta eat. If unions fought to get our great-grandparents out of sweat shops, and promised our Granddads’ work that took them from high school to retirement with dignity while paying for their kids educations, a house, vacations, and anniversary diamonds, then unions must be the answer to our pay being worth less than our parents was, to having no health care or paid sick days, to the requirement that we have degrees to please. Unionizing must be the answer, right? It’s just odd. What are we working for? What do we work for? What do we make with our work?
We make a machine go. The machine produces sick people. The machine produces bored and disoriented people. It produces exhausted and angry people. The machine produces mental illness and suicide and addiction. It produces yogurt with 20-grams of sugar per child breakfast and keto-bread and fitness clubs full of fitness equipment made far, far away. The machine produces contracts, people to update the contracts, people to read the revisions, people to help other people request money per the contractual stipulations so they can find out why mice get cancer when they have high cholesterol and don’t sleep enough. The machine produces slots to be filled. We are not slot-shaped. We are not blocks, or dominos, we are not pegs we do not fit holes. The machine makes nothing good. Nothing, anymore, except more of itself.
All we, all the tired collective masses want, is to be free of the machine. That is all we’ve ever wanted and yet it came with us. When our great-great-bubbies and nonas and papis schlepped and scraped and huddled to this place the wanted to escape the machinery too. PAY US. Just pay us a fair exchange for our goods and we will be neighbors. Why are there always superbugs? Why do they sneak in with the rest of us, who want equality and the freedom its true meaning suggests? Why do they convince the hungrier or more opportunistic to agree? Why can’t we go back to the farm again and see that the farm is where our souls are? Do the children of our bubbies, do our parents, have to all die for us to finally get closer to making a world that knows its own limits? Or is a millennia what was needed? In about 400 years, when European descendants have been in America for a thousand years, will the pendulum be closer to center – where we use what we make and we need no more?
I don’t want a mortgage to live in this city. I want a home with soil to till. I want to learn what its composition is. I want my neighbor to say to me, Nah, don’t do it that way. You’re sowing those too close together. You gotta space ’em out about six inches more. And in my thanks I will grow better and smarter and more and I will share. I will say to them one later day, Hey, you aught to collect those drippings. They make a nice new light when you put them together like this.
Getting out of this machine doesn’t happen in a day. And yet, I can plan. I can plan and return from distraction (new line of super soft fleece air slides! like kitten fur on your toes! no fatigue guaranteed!) and work my plan. Maybe a mortgage is part of my plan. Maybe learning who the best for financial advisors of color in the area are is part of my plan. Maybe finding out which ones can work with kinda poorish white queer allies is part of it. Maybe taking my retirement funds and bricking them up with companies that know they’re not gods is part of my plan. Maybe a mortgage, so I don’t have to burn my money in someone else’s fireplace all while they consider the place my family sleeps an asset, is part of it too. Maybe all my dreams, which are fighting against my fears, which are hidden behind distractions, are the best plans I’ve ever had and they, just like me, are a little late blooming and its all part of the plan.
Shana Rose Up 