When I was training to be a battered women’s advocate, my supervisor said something that really blew my mind:
“You can always assume one thing about your clients; and that is that they are doing their best. Always assume everyone is doing their best. And if they’re having a day where their best just isn’t that great, or their best doesn’t look like your best, you have to be okay with that.”
Any now whenever anyone in my life, either a friend or a client, frustrates me, disappoints me, or pisses me off, I just tell myself They are doing their best. Their best isn’t that great today, but I have days where my best isn’t that great either.
Another thing that really bothers me about the conversations around ‘riots’ is the amount of people who have a binary image of ‘big capitalist store’ versus the romantized ‘honest local store’ and think they can tell the difference from a photo.
A lot of local stores feel the need to compete with the big stores and treat their employees like shit. There are so many ‘local’ stores out there exploiting teenagers and undocumented people, paying them less than minimum wage, pushing them to work without breaks and to unpaid overtime. And local activists often know exactly who the worst bastards in town are.
When I was young I worked at a cute little local bakery that exploited a hand full of underage workers, denying us basic workers rights and minimum wage and exposing us to constant emotional abuse. We worked long shifts on ovens placed much to close together without proper protective gear and we burned ourselves almost every day. We were given minimal time and no proper supplies to treat burns. I once burned myself very badly and dropped the bread I was holding and the boss made me sit through a ten minute shouting before I could treat my burn. I still have clear scars from that work after many years.
So if the riot ever comes to that town, you can bet I’ll be right in front leading the charge to burn that cute little local bakery.
a handful of years ago there was a pretty intense effort to establish a downtown workers union in my town with folks that worked along the central tourist hub and while it didn’t form for a lot of different complicated reasons one of them was that the local small business owners fought tooth and nail every step of the way
A snippet from an article on Huffington Post about what it means to be working poor.
Pretty spot on…
I got into an argument today with someone who is a landlord, and they were outraged, outraged, to find that their evicted tenants owned an Xbox 360. Never mind that the console was ten years old and worth perhaps $50 on Craigslist, they were outraged that their evicted tenants did not sell it, along with the very clothes on their back, to pay their back rent. I tried to explain to him that when you are $1800 in back rent, $50 isn’t even a dent in that debt. Why bother? Why bother selling that $50 item if it isn’t going to get you any less evicted? If it’s not going to save you, you’ll hold on to it. Money becomes meaningless when you’ll never have enough to hold onto. You just let it flow like water through your hands. It’s all gone anyways, no matter what you do. It was gone before it ever touched you.
The other day I got very mad at someone because their justification of why a family didn’t deserve their council house was because they had decorated the front of their house with xmas lights. DO YOU REALLY KNOW WHAT ITS LIKE TO LIVE WITH NO SMALL PLEASURES AT ALL?!?!? DO YOU REALLY?!?!
This is one of the great end results of capitalism: we treat people as if the only thing they should care about are their mechanical needs but without things to nourish the soul or the capacity to talk about same, we fall apart.
We aren’t meant to be things which sit in blank boxes waiting to be used by our employers. Nothing in nature acts that way. Nothing’s meant to.
The need rich people have for poor people to constantly perform some sort of Dickensian display of abject poverty is so goddamn disgusting and proves that, yes, it is all about status markers. Rich people want visible proof that others are beneath them. It’s malicious and nauseating. And the kicker is that they’re usually too busy being impressed with their own wealth and sense of superiority to use their brains, because as already stated in the other comments, having technology or a couple of small pleasures is *not* a reliable indicator of income. This anti-poor people shit is revolting.
And it turns poor and working-class people against each other. Like I knew a guy who installed cable TV for a living and barely could make a living, and resented that some people who got cable TV were on welfare. I tried to explain that you actually have to spend a certain amount of money in order to qualify for such basic thing as Medicaid – if you save money you’ll get thrown off the system, even though you won’t magically be able to survive outside the system with the amount of money you have to save in order to be thrown off it. He didn’t care. He told me poor people should be given nothing more than food, clothing, and shelter. He grew up poorer than most poor people have ever been. All this combination of shit made me furious and still does. Not to mention the cultural ideals of being too proud to accept help of any kind and how people think this is a good thing even when it kills people.
The poorest people in the world forgo some amount of necessities for staying alive in order to have some money for recreation or things that connect them to the world. During the Depression, many people surveyed said they would rather give up their beds than their radios – radio being how people stayed connected to the outside world in the same way Internet does today. And does anyone need to bring up Rat Park again? Holy crap this stuff pisses me off.
(– Poor person who has Internet & Netflix & smartphone & other so-called luxuries. And does anyone really think the extra $100ish a month I’d get giving all that up would catapult me out of poverty and solve all my problems? Not to mention the Internet has literally saved my life before. As in, I was in the hospital being mistreated in a way that was life-threatening, and blogging allowed me and another poor person who was making decisions for me, to get other people to call the hospital and say “We’re watching you.” Other poor people get food and rent and etc. money by asking on the Internet and receiving food money through the Internet. Many people on disability supplement their income by selling art or small crafts online – how much you’re allowed to sell before they start cutting benefits depends on what part of the system you’re in, but it’s a common thing.)
Share the shit out of this. Share the ever-loving shit out of this. The UK is facing a vote with a party that has been very vocal about fucking over the homeless. Remind them why this policy is trash. Raise a huge swell of sympathy. Make it political suicide to go ahead with their plans.
It is. Sex work has more gender discrimination, more dangers, more hazards in general, so in many ways, sex work is generally harder work. It should be respected. And legalized.
ofdreamsanddragons 