(Illustration: A coin issued by Brutus in the autumn of 42 B.C., encrypted with EID MAR (Eidibus Martiis – on the ‘Ides of March’), and was found here).
By Eva M.
Hardly a surprise.
However, I just couldn’t help but shake my head in disgust yesterday when I read that part of Joe Biden’s relief bill, which would have raised the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, had gone the way of Julius Caesar, slashed to death on the Senate floor. The parallel was underscored by the fact that eight of the naysayers were fucking Democrats.
E tu, Brute?
I’m now going to take a brief moment to offer my most sincere and heartfelt apology to anyone who, upon reading my witty, yet charmingly-unpretentious metaphor, was automatically stricken and/or physically sickened by the mental picture of Lindsay Graham in a toga.
I happen to live in a city that took the initiative in 2017 and passed a vote that effectively raised the local minimum wage to $15. Even taking into consideration a real estate market that’s more exclusive than Vatican City, with an average price per square foot that’s as casually effective at quashing the dreams of non-millionaire interlopers as the Trump administration was at crushing the dreams of brown skinned children, this is by far the best city I’ve ever lived in (and I’ve been all over; from Virginia Beach, to San Diego, to Lubbock, to Pensacola by way of Alabama, and a half dozen small towns as well).
So, I do have a point of reference.
The most frustrating aspect of the minimum wage issue, besides the gosh-dawg principle of the thing, is the monumental disconnect that it implies. When I joined the workforce in 1994 at the age of fourteen, minimum wage was $4.25 per hour. By the time I turned eighteen it was up to $7.00 per hour. That was in 1998.
The current minimum wage, over two decades later, is $7.50.
Thank goodness that the cost of living hasn’t increased at all since then!
I mean, wow.
The only thing worse than wondering how these shitheels in the Senate pass themselves off as living, breathing, feeling human beings is actually understanding their way of thinking. They don’t seem to mind the minimum wage really matters.
Who has a minimum wage job, anyway? School kids and seniors looking to supplement their social security. Convicts and mentally/physically disabled persons.
If you are attempting to support a family on a minimum wage salary you obviously made some unfortunate choices somewhere along the way, but that’s really nobody’s fault but your own. Now, is it?
The disconnect is that these senators, highly-educated men and women all, public servants, if you will, the best and the brightest in a country that prides itself on being the best and brightest, the moral beacon, the fucking lighthouse of enlightenment in a vast sea of squalor, can’t see the value of a mandatory living wage.
Or, more accurately, can’t see the GLARINGLY OBVIOUS downside of choosing not to provide one. Like, for instance, the absurd number of Americans who work more than one full-time job and STILL qualify for assistance (not to mention all the poor schmoes who work up to 80-percent of their lives away, yet still REQUIRE foodstamps or some form of aid to get by).
Hopefully the crime rate won’t have to catch up with that of our neighbors south of the border before these Idiots wake up and smell the tear gas.
We may not have packs of feral children running barefoot through the streets, but there’s a reason Trump was elected. He was a symptom, as well as the cancerous tumor.
We’re all still recovering from the damage he did. I just hope that the lack of foresight the senate demonstrated yesterday doesn’t prolong our recovery.
Ce’est le vie.
“Didn’t know we had a king, thought we was a autonomous collective…”
(Illustration: Salvador Dali’s ‘Soft Watch at the Moment of First Explosion,’ found here).