Playing Fair and Being Kind

TRIGGER – CLICK – BANG!

 I miss having my old Dodge pick-up around. It’s been in the shop for a few hundred months feels like. Well, I got a call a few minutes ago from the mechanic. We bought a used ignition module that is also called a engine-computer-unit or module. I bought it on ebay. It seems to be running o.k. he said. It started a little rough but after three tries the engine lighted off just fine and ran good. I told him to hang onto the truck for a few days and drive it around to see if the problem is gone for good.

Interspersed in these various words he and I had we also talked about his mother-in-law with the cancer and she had to stay home and stuff. He and his wife took a few days up country to camp for a mini-vacation in the woods near a lake. That was nice and he needed a break from the shipyard he said. I mentioned my own sad stories of my two older sons and he was polite and expressed his sorrow about that. Then we got on the subject of the Dodge, it’s a ’90 model Ram, 4-wheel drive. It’s old but really a horse. It goes good especially in the snow and stuff.

Then he mentioned he’s not been at the shipyard because the union is on strike and he’s been out of work. That is when I felt the old fire come up in me. I don’t like how the working person has to go begging for a living wage during anytime, not just during the Covid-19 when people are hurting for food and gotta pay mortgages and rents and stuff. It pisses me the hell off when the working folks need to go kiss ass for a little bit of a raise just to keep up. I didn’t let him get a word in while I began my rant about the bosses having so much money, they can’t count it. They have no idea how much money they got.

Money is power and they don’t want to share what they got because they are in competition with all the other rich business people for all the money. It’s a sad world we live in. We don’t compete against each other on the job as much as the bosses compete at the banks and the investment companies. Jeezum, do they get real cut-throat in the markets and stuff. I told him that it’s not left versus right but more like rich versus poor. The poor, that’s us fighting to stay alive while the bosses fight to see who gets first dibs on the country hand-outs for tax breaks and stuff. Jeezum crow!

The truth is that with Capitalism there is no way to give everyone a chance at the wealth. Fewer and fewer people have the money. I don’t know if many people know this. In Capitalism the money is like Monopoly money. In Monopoly the game goes until one person has all the money. Dog eat dog. That is exactly how it all works. I’ve noticed that fewer and few people have all the money. Pretty soon it will be only one or two people with money. They will rule the world. We are in for a heap of trouble I’ll tell you.

I told him when I go to Bath or Brunswick, I make sure I’m carrying a ten or twenty for those guys who stand at the traffic lights for hand-outs. I said I try to keep them carrying some money too. I said that is the only way they are going to get money for their families or just themselves. They get it from other poor people like us and that the rich folks don’t give a damn. They don’t care about the guy standing there on the island by the traffic light. The only way he’s going to get money is from us other poor people. Rich people don’t give away a goddam thing.

I could tell by now my mechanic friend was getting a little distracted and no longer listening to my rant so I told him to go ahead and keep the truck and put some gas in it and try it out for a few days to make sure the problem we had was really gone. Damn, I hope it runs good. I sure could use it what with all the trash I have to take to the dump and other stuff.

Gentle George
July 27, 2020