#21 - Good News, Good Advice, Good Grief
Some lovely tidbits, and we return to the world of the megaliths
RARITIES AHEAD: Some Good News
By the time I send this newsletter, this news will be nearly a month old. Given the relative dearth of labor reporting and the rarity of good legislative news these days, I think these bear repeating anyway.
March ended strong as the Amazon Labor Union secured it’s unionization vote. It wasn’t even close, with the “Yeas” winning by more than 500 votes. There are a lot of things that make this win historic:
The Staten Island warehouse is the first US Amazon facility to successfully unionize.
They did so on their own, without the institutional support of outside unions or prominent left-leaning federal legislators.
They succeeded in spite of millions spent by Amazon on union-busting efforts.
Interim ALU President Chris Smalls remained part of the fight for nearly two years after Amazon fired him for criticizing the company for failing to provide PPE early in the pandemic.
Another warehouse in the same complex is already poised to unionize, with voting set to begin on April 25th, and more are readying to vote as well.
And I’m sure I’m missing something.
This gem from Smalls makes me smile every time:
We want to thank Jeff Bezos for going to space, because while he was up there we were organizing a union.
Meanwhile, the second vote at Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama facility is too close to call as of 2 April. Amazon stands in the lead with 993 No votes to 875 Yes votes, but more than 400 are being challenged. There is plenty of room for this to fall in the worker’s favor, and though it doesn’t look good, count no one out until it’s over. Bessemer, you may remember, previously failed to secure unionization last year in an election the National Labor Relations Board invalidated due to Amazon’s rampant, illegal union busting efforts.
Here’s hoping that the Amazon Labor Union can replicate some of Starbuck Workers United’s success. As of 1 April, 10 out of 11 stores (at month’s end, the # of unionized locations now stands at 25 with no additional loses) which held unionization votes have succeeded and another 200+ stores are in the process of unionizing. Their scale and success is incredible, and every union win is a win for workers, be they Starbucks employees or not. A high union tide raises all worker ships!
On the non-labor legislative side of things, the US House wrapped up March with a couple of promising bills passed through to the Senate. The first was a $35 cap on insulin prices, an utterly necessary, life-saving injunction against corporate pharmaceutical greed. The second was a bill to federally decriminalize cannabis and expunge the records of all non-violent offenders charged with cannabis-related crimes. Both bills face a tough Senate, not least because of a handful assholes who’s names you already know. I expect the cannabis bill has a stronger chance, but I won’t be surprised if neither pass the Senate (update: the insulin package was voted down by all Republicans). Even so, it’s good to appreciate movement from time to time.
Useful Tips
Without going back to the archives, I feel like I’ve said more than once that I’m not the biggest fan of listicles. Then again, what are people if not walking contradictions.
I came across a list of “100 Tips for a Better Life” and appreciated enough of them that I felt the need to share a few gems. I had to whittle down to these, so I highly recommend the whole list even if I don’t truck with all of them.
You will prevent yourself from even having thoughts that could lower your status.
Avoid blocking yourself off just so people keep thinking you’re cool.
This one falls apart for me halfway through—hence the strikethrough—so I offer it instead in the vein in which I originally interpreted it. We live in an a class-stratified society. I say that to anyone reading this post in English, regardless of your country of origin, because the capital-S State is hegemonic globally. The dimensions of class differ greatly from one place to another, but capitalism is the economic engine of the world. This means that whether one thinks of class at all is immaterial. Your class defines so much.
Almost all Americans tend to think of themselves as “middle class,” a term that has lost all meaning. The only likely exceptions are the very, very poor and the 1%. Feeling a tirade coming on that is not my intent in this section, I’ll be brief and simply say that ones class can quickly come to loggerheads with their values. Unless you are incredibly disciplined in sticking to your values, and reaffirming why they are your values, your economic class will win out.
Do. Not. Let. It. If we can imagine a better world, we can damn well make it. Do not allow yourself to become a class traitor.
Cultivate a reputation for being dependable. Good reputations are valuable because they’re rare (easily destroyed and hard to rebuild). You don’t have to brew the most amazing coffee if your customers know the coffee will always be hot.
This one bring to mind an old Red Green line: “If the women don't find you handsome, they should at least find you handy.
I think being loyal and dependable goes a whole lot further than being the best in the room. Being there and willing is always so much more than being absent and capable. Willingness will take you a long way, which brings me to…
Discipline is superior to motivation. The former can be trained, the latter is fleeting. You won’t be able to accomplish great things if you’re only relying on motivation.
There’s a webcomic on this that I just love:
Stephen King, in On Writing, said “Writers writer.” When I was writing fiction, this was my morning mantra. In 3 years, I wrote 3.5 novels. Are they great? NO! But I wrote them through discipline, not motivation.
Can I get an AMEN? Waiting for motivation is like waiting for the muses. They won’t find you unless you’re in the right place with the right state of mind possessing the right tools.
Motivation will always fail you. It is fickle. It waxes and wanes. Discipline will make sure that when the motivation hits, when your muses come, you know what to do with what they bring.
Things that aren’t your fault can still be your responsibility.
So many of these bring to mind a quote long lodged in my brain. In this case, it is the oft quoted line from Marcus Parks of The Last Podcast on the Left: “Your mental illness isn’t your fault, but it’s your responsibility.”
Rumination is one among a host of problems plaguing us today. Rumination is the immoderate friend of self-reflection. It takes looking inward too far and exacerbates problems instead of helping one to deal with them. Rumination turns one’s responsibilities into their faults, their shortcomings, their failures.
Something can be, indeed often is, one’s responsibility without being one’s fault. For instance, we have inherited a world destroyed by industrialism and capitalism. This is not our fault, but righting the ship is damn well our responsibility.
DO NOT TALK TO COPS.
Don’t! Insist on having an attorney present. Far too many people have been railroaded by even well-intentioned cops because they spoke when they shouldn’t have. Don’t talk to cops. Ever.
A Rising Urge, Devoid of Meaning, Part II
Be kind, please. My internal editor is on vacation this month.
The evening news slotted in the story about the disappearance of the megaliths, illustrated with security cam b-roll of receding rocks, between a politician’s call for a return to law and order and hubbub about the latest album for a never-was-canceled musician/serial abuser.
That b-roll is gonna be everywhere, reversed and slowed down and refuted, I thought. I looked away, but only as far as my tablet, where social media was giving the news the same treatment.
The disappearance of the megaliths was top trending everywhere, but scrolling through I could see the ratio was being expertly managed by the engagement algorithm. Mentions of the megaliths ranged from neat, uncritically accepted hypotheses to deranged, falsifiable, and yet earnestly believed, yet slotted into the morass were all the mundanities of a standard day online There must have been as many posts not about the megaliths as there were about them, and that just doesn’t seem possible.
The thought verges on the kind of conspiratorial thinking that worries Mom, but it’s only paranoia if you’re wrong, right? Maybe it just made me too uncomfortable to think that anyone really gave a damn about anything else.
I forced my attention away from the tablet a moment like Mom taught me. She was focused on her phone, typing with purpose. The news was paused.
“What’re you doing, Mom?”
She seemed shocked to find him there. “Honey? Oh, uh, Clyder.”
“Who’s Clyder?,” I asked.
She placed her phone aside, then motioned to the screen. “The…uh…governor.”
“Are they our governor?”
She sighed heavily. “Yeah, she is.”
“What’s wrong Mom? Why are you worried about the governor? Did she say something about the rocks?”
“No.” She said this pointedly. It sounded like I was making her point, but to whom I couldn’t say. “Or, well, she did, but only to dismiss them as beneath her.”
I chuckled at that, and a bit of her tension seemed to fall away. She smiled, at first to be nice but then for real.
“I guess she’s right about one thing,” Mom said. “Or maybe not. Maybe they sunk back down and then… POOF…disappeared. Did you know that they tired to dig up a lot of the megaliths at first?”
I did, but it was best to let her tell me about some things I’d learned online. I always worried she’d realize just how much time I spent on if I knew too much about any one thing she brought up.
When the rocks first rose, there were plenty of people who took them as a threat. Some small number of people ran away from them, and from everyone else, to live in the hills. Preppers and less nice words. Most of those thin-skinned people—Mom’s words—lashed out. Some lashed out at each other, some at the rocks themselves.
I found a graining video once of a guy with one of those massive rigs that can lift a boat out of a lake. It was anchored to a huge foundation, and he’s rigged up a system and attached pulls all over the megalith. When he turned the thing on, he seemed to strain as much as the machine. As he ramped up the power, the machine made terrible noises. After a while, the microphone on the camera couldn’t make sense of them and the audio track guttered out. Then the crane arm crumpled just as the foundation cracked. Lucky for him, he didn’t collapse under the pressure like his rig, but he wasn’t far off.
That guy had seen all the people trying everything they could think of to lift the megaliths. Hundreds around the globe failed to budge the rocks even a centimeter no matter how much power they threw at the problem. The guy in the video wasn’t the first to try digging under the rock. That bit seemed obvious, at least to everyone who hadn’t tried shooting the rocks out of place. What if you were pulling on the tip of an iceberg? What if 90% of the damn thing was underground? Anyone with a bit of sense tried to dig and see where the rock stopped, and it was usually just a few inches down.
I realized I was only half listening to Mom, too distracted by thoughts of people now digging massive holes to look for the missing rocks.
“…and you could just dig right under them and they wouldn’t move. I always thought it was stupid, the people who tried to dig under without any protection if the damn thing fell on them, but they were lucky. The few people I ever heard of that dug clear under the rocks said they just hovered in place. Not even a magnetic field underneath. Just empty air.”
I saw a chance to jump in. “Oh yeah. I remember something about that. Didn’t the holes sorta…fill themselves back in?”
“Supposedly,” she said. “The next morning, people said the holes were filled back in. Rocks never moved a bit. Spooky stuff, huh?”
“Yeah.” Now I needed to know about those diggers out there. Were the megaliths actually gone, or just below?
Mom’s attention strayed back to her phone, though her fingers were still as she thought. When I bagged up my stuff, she seemed to be looking through her phone.