dís ulfhuguð

People who shoplift and minimum wage workers are very often the same people. Min wage workers often are forced to take abuse in the workplace just to survive. Just because becky said it's ok to stop caring about them and wrongly assumes her relative safety is the norm doesn't mean it actually is.

So there is this really funny thing you all are doing where you imagine I have the survival money saved up and time to lose my job and search for a new job and file a lawsuit. Pro bono work still comes at a personal cost. When you live paycheck to paycheck you don’t get to take leisure time off to fight the man. Some of us aren’t on mommy’s health insurance plan, either, and can't afford to lose that access.  And, as I said, they can call your lack of preventative action gross misconduct, and it won’t qualify as garnishing. Also, I recommend you try working in a restaurant for a little while. You’ll be amazed by what they pay you. I would love for you all to touch fucking grass and find out what it’s actually genuinely like to, say, be a construction worker on the tracks in NYC. Or work for a cash-only local shop. You don’t get to be the smarmy rich white girl who lets things go wrong just to stick it to The Man and feel falsely valiant- all because she knows if she gets fired she can just get money from her parents to pay rent while she takes her time figuring something else out. 

You all are the boot lickers here. You're the kind of people who would happily let the vulnerable die trying to live up to your ideal before it's actually realized. Police shouldn't be violent towards people of color, but you don't go around saying: “I’m white and live a comfortable life, and I stood up to the police once, and it went ok, so I’ve decided anyone who is more vulnerable than I am is a lazy / higher-than-thou / bootlicker. Plus racially motivated violence is illegal so like, the victims should’ve just grabbed a lawyer and fought that.” You don’t say that, because that would be fucked up to say. But here you all are letting a probably-fake story told by Paris Hilton over there (about the time she tried a poor job on TV) give you permission to stop caring about the safety of minimum wage employees. Many minimum wage workers are people struggling to protect themselves and survive, often taking abuse because their only other choice is having no job at all and losing everything.

Imagine being so short on empathy for a vulnerable group that it took one middle class white girl's words to give you permission to stop caring entirely, to the point where you're harassing / telling a member of that group to *die* for calling out her white privilege. Who's the real bootlicker here?

Both poor people working min wage jobs that abuse them, and poor people stealing, are living in the same boat- they are both living in desperation and both need help. But you navel-gazers, looking on from relative comfort, are sitting there chuckling along that poor folks should be laying their lives down for other poor folks, otherwise they’re “bootlickers” and “holier-than-thou,” all because some privileged white girl had a fun little moment at her summer job.

 Corporations love putting the pressure to solve issues they created on the consumer, and you’re all here thinking you’re woke by perpetuating that very same victim-blaming mentality- looking down from the high horse of relative comfort & financial security, demanding that poor people lay down what little they have for each other in order to be worthy. It’s disgusting that you all are resorting to victim-blaming to avoid seeing minimum-wage workers as human. Underprivileged people are not your sacrificial lambs, especially because the less privileged someone is, the higher the risk is for them to self-advocate. Stop asking victimized people to sacrifice themselves for other victimized people just so you don’t have to think too hard or make a real change.