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Friday night is Bill Moyers’ Journal night. It gets me through Saturday which is another of my “long days.”
I am sixty-eight years old, recently college educated, single; living on the edge of financial disaster. Not complaining, mind you. I could work sixty or eighty hours a week and gain the admiration of a culture that lionizes dedicated-to-your company workaholism that leaves no time for a personal life. I have that choice. And I would be able pay all the bills, but not for long. I’d be dead or convalescing in the nearest veteran’s hospital, in which case I would go under financially because not working means not getting paid. So, I put in thirty-three hours a week as a Certified Nursing Assistant and, in my off time I write and paint with the hope that some day some income may be generated from this activity. Maybe the novel or the children’s book I am working on will get published or my artistic talent will be discovered. Stranger things have happened.
Three of my paid working days, Tuesday, Friday and Saturday involve nine straight hours. The work is physical, a bit taxing at times and it only pays if you work. There is no vacation time, sick pay, retirement plan, medical or dental coverage or overtime pay. The two days in a row of nine hour shifts without a lunch or supper hour are, well not too bad, but I wouldn’t want to do more than that in a row and the pleasure of watching Bill Moyers’ Journal in the middle of those two days is what makes Saturdays easier. I take Sunday and Monday totally off.
This past Friday night, Bill Moyers interviewed the author of “Nickel and Dimed in the USA,” Barbara Ehrenreich. Barbara and Bill were discussing the well-known but largely ignored fact that low unemployment figures do not reflect the reality that large numbers of high paying jobs no longer exist in this country and that growing numbers of formerly highly paid people now eke out a savings depleted, below-poverty-level, benefit-free existence on the edge of financial disaster. The existence of this cheap labor pool is a situation that has been created by and is a boon to the multinational corporate structure whose CEO’s have bought our politicians and which controls world markets.
One of the career fields Ehrenreich mentioned as existing on this tier of poverty included my occupation, “Certified Nursing Assistant”. I thought, “Hey, that’s me.” Of course, intellectually, I know I am in the vanguard of the wave of thirdworldism that is rapidly sweeping across the land of the free. But if I live through it perhaps it will make me a better writer/artist in spite of the many times I moan, “I am too old for this.” The real sadness I feel is for people like the lovely little lady who works at a local low-price outlet where the poverty tier shops. She told me once that she can only afford to spend $20.00 a week on groceries and has no benefits, sick days or vacation days. Today she told me that her husband is a veteran and has serious health problems, but cannot afford to take time off to go to Columbia to the Veteran’s Hospital to get it taken care of. I have no idea how the two of them are able to eat on $20.00 a week or how he continues to work with his health problems.
I am fighting mad over this situation. The many aspects of the criminality of the the despots who control our lives and fortunes have me seething with frustrated anger every day of my life. I relieve my frustrations in activism; in protesting the war, in badgering my republican congressman, in efforts on canvass in acrylics and in writing pieces for OPEDNEWS. At least I have these outlets. I don’t know how the little lady at the low-price outlet handles her frustration. She works as many hours as she can get and so, I imagine, does her husband. That’s the way the corporatocracy likes it. She and her veteran husband don’t have time to protest. They are just trying to survive. If everyone in the former middle-class is chained to such a grinding wheel of poverty, “they” the corporate rulers win. No one has time to watch them. I think I would just rather spend as many hours as I can protesting, marching, writing and painting. And watching them. I can’t take it with me anyway.
