28 & Struggling

How ludicrous to work 40 hours a week. To spend such a disproportionate amount of your life working for someone else’s business and not have time to live. 

At the time of it’s institution, the minimum wage was indented to be a livable wage. 

The point of living in a developed economy is allowing citizens the opportunity to work fewer hours.

The term “communism” has been used quite a bit on social media lately, especially as an accusation directed at the Biden administration. Since I’ve seen it used so often, I’ve needed to give myself a refresher on the basics of the ideology.

The motivation: To end class warfare between those who own the means of production and those who sell their labor for profit.

The means:  Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels believed this would be achieved by reorganizing society into communes where all profit and property is shared. Communist writers such as Marx and Engels also theorized the final development of society would make organized government obsolete. 

Hours after President Biden’s and Vice President Harris’ inauguration, social media is full of reports of extremist groups retracting their support of former President Trump or realizing what a scam it was. 

I’m suspicious of news outlets reporting “private messages” between group members but I do hope it’s true. I hope Trump loses all support from these groups and he disappears from the public view. My greatest fear has been that he’ll be back in 2024.

These groups that supported him, they must not fade from the public mind. The Proud Boys and Qanon are still here. They will rearrange their beliefs in Trump’s absence but the core of their ideology will not change.

Watching the inauguration this morning, I wonder, “where do we go from here?”

20 years ago, Americans were united against a common enemy. Foreign terrorists had attacked us where we live. I was 8-years-old that morning the twin towers fell. Over the course of the next several years, “patriotism” seemed to be on everyone’s lips and in every heart. My young self believed in America.

As an adult, I wonder how united we really were then. The attack on the capitol seems such an extreme shift from that “united front”. This dissidence is obvious - or at least recognized - by all sides. Everyone cries for unity.

They don’t really mean “unity”, do they? What they mean to say is, “abandon your beliefs and convictions and come to this side because you’re wrong and we’re right and it’s time to do things our way.” This is not unity. It’s not even compromise. 

It’s been really strange, that last few months, to live through these moments in history, the Pandemic, the Black Lives Matter marches, the Attack on the Capitol, and to only be able to respond as an observer. 

Never had I imagined I would live through events of note or consequence. As a child, I foolishly believed the world was “done.” There was no more work to do. History books were a review of how we got to this place, the pinnacle of society. The older I got, the more I understood how much farther we have to go.

But to be so far removed from the action - if I had imagined myself living through history, it would not be from the background. As many do, I would have imagined myself in the middle of it, an active hand shaping events and working towards a better future.