Esoteric Merit

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They want buckskin and face paint, drumming, songs in languages they can’t understand recorded for them but with English subtitles, of course. They want educated, well spoken, but not too smart. Christian, well behaved, never question. They want to learn the history of the people, but not the ones that are here now, waving signs in their faces, asking them for clean drinking water, asking them why their women are going missing, asking them why their land is being ruined.

They want fantastical stories of Indians that used to roam this land. They want my culture behind glass in a museum.

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

Systems of power have always relied on isolating people and turning them against each other. The current system we live under absolutely does not look out for or protect children, so it's absolutely critical that there be adults in reach that a child can trust outside their immediate family or authority structures. And it's just as critical that kids know how to find and connect with these people.

An 8 year old considered me her best friend after I met her at a toys 'r us when her mom slapped her, and i confronted her mom about it. I was the only person she talked to about the parental abuse for a while until she felt confident enough to tell others. I gave her a copy of my house key in case she ever needed it. (she hasn't. Her dad's in prison now and her mom is . . . better enough that she's forgiven her)

I run TTRPGs and regularly make friends that way. Some of them are 80, some of them are 12, we all bond over being omnipotent magical frogs for a while.

I'm a known eccentric at my local nerd conventions. I've checked in on younguns' who I notice are seeming overwhelmed, or are sitting by themselves away from their friends, and sometimes they tell me all their life troubles and about their depression or anxiety or whatnot and I'm able to give them my perspective . . . which is helpful sometimes.

I run a YouTube channel reaching people how to make custom content for a specific videogame series, and most of the people I interact with there are teenagers, (they have the most free time to do such things).

I bike everywhere, and I'm often seen repairing my bike on the sidewalk outside my apartment, so the neighbourhood kids will often cluster around me getting me to fix or tweak their bikes for them.

I've known my friends' son since he was born, and I've tutored him in math from grade 1 to 3rd year university. He joined my fencing club for a while, he's been in and out of my boardgames groups.

My friend's daughter is the weirdest little gothic drama queen autistic 13 year old, and we hang out and watch anime together. I show her classics like cowboy Bebop and talk about the influences they've hard on anime since then, and she shows me recent stuff like Frieren and we get to discuss how awareness and familiarity of fantasy tropes has evolved to allow such storylines.

Like, there's nothing predatory about generation-gap friendships, (and the weird thing about them is only that it's less likely to happen so it sticks out), and ergo a best friendship isn't predatory either.

I can't imagine refusing to bond with or help someone over age. I can imagine not liking someone because they're a horrible brat, but that's age-independant. I don't generally enjoy being around kids, and they tend to remind me of my childhood traumas and trigger me by being kids. But like, that's not a them problem.