The Trip

The trip I remember most was our family trip to Virginia in 1966. I was ten. We took MJ with us. MJ was a Black kid who lived in Brandywine Homes. We became friends playing Caln Little League.

We stopped in a small town to have lunch. At that time there was no great proliferation of Fast Food Restaurants like we have today.

We sat down at the table and waited. There were four white men in the restaurant. We waited. No service. My father pointed out the sign hanging over the window to the kitchen. "We Reserve the Right..."

If you know me and my snap judgmental vocals and quick temper, imagine my mother, Emma, times ten. She took after her father, Ted Daniels, who was according to family sources, a Bullhonk. My father showed my mother the sign, read it to her, and began to explain. My mother couldn't read having quit school in sixth grade. My father didn't get to finish.
"I'll be goddamned!" my mother said loudly in her West End dialect. Oh...she was heard.

The chair screamed as she stood. She went to the counter, "Are you gonna serve us or not?"

The waitress was silent.

"That boy's with us," Emma said. "He's none of your goddamned business!"

The man sitting on the stool at the counter turned his head toward the noise and then lowered it toward his soup. The two men sitting at the table turned their heads to look at my mother and then toward the street level window. The waitress looked at the man in a Fedora handling a toothpick in his mouth, sitting by the window in the corner with his foot on the windowsill. He nodded.

The waitress picked up her pad and menus and walked around the corner of the counter to our table.
"I'll bring some water," the waitress said.

We finished our lunch with the usual kid chatter, MJ, my sister Laurie, and I. We knew how Emma Beck was. As for everything else, we were clueless.

MJ doesn't remember this incident. Maybe it didn't have an impact because we sheltered him from the intentions of the waitress and the man in the Fedora at the window. I think in the car my mother said that they were sonsabitches for taking so long to serve us but never mentioned race so as not to embarrass MJ.

Employing foreign workers... 

What we miss about foreigners is not in our worldview because we rarely associate with them and when we do, we get a faux impression of them. We only see what they want to show us.

I don't see anything wrong with employing foreign medical professionals from an economic, social, or cultural position. If an American is a rarity in these highly intellectual jobs, than for those Americans who do qualify, they will be in high demand.

We are taking the best from other countries. If you think that these foreigners are somehow here to undermine the status quo of society and redistribute wealth and power, you are wrong The upper classes of India, China, the Middle East, and Latin America understand privilege and embrace it.

After working for years in Migrant Education and advocating for Puerto Ricans and Mexicans, I discovered soon that the Hispanic professionals hired by IUs and school districts because they were "bilingual and bicultural" did not have the same feeling of empathy and benevolence for their own people as I did. My empathy for them was not superficial but rather embedded, based upon my experience dealing with my mother's illiteracy. I understood how speaking and reading, that is, language, was empowering and how the lack of it kept people on the margins.

Puerto Ricans from the upper class and especially those educators from Chile, Argentina, and even Mexico had as much contempt for mushroom pickers as those I would label as racist Americans. The workers of whom I taught and their children, were neither literate in Spanish or in English, hence, oppressed and disenfranchised in both cultures.

Hispanics may not see color the same as Americans but worse yet they see class. Class is an impediment to achievement and doesn't fit well into a Capitalist System. Those crossing our southern border aren't escaping political oppression or gang violence. They're accustomed to that. They're escaping the fatalism inherent in Hispanic Culture.

  Time for four-day work week

I think it's time for four-day work week with the option, when possible, of working from home. We don't live in the Industrial Age, the Informational Age, nor the Computer Age. We live in the AI Age or maybe we can label it the Cyber Age. We don't live in reality. We live on our phones. Our phones are our umbilical cords. Here are three reasons for a four-day work week:

I. A five-day work week is a concoction of the patriarchy. It suits men who as hunters go out and stalk game, aka, money. It is horrific for women who in spite of declaring their liberation are still tied to the traditional role of child bearing and child caring. Working from home helps ease the pressures of child caring. This we learned from COVID.

II. Requiring employees to work in an office is simply a way to demonstrate the chain of command paradigm adopted from the military. Who is at the top? Usually a man but sometimes a woman who is trying to mimic a man. Mimesis is the highest form of flattery. These cock strong bosses and copycat women strut and prance around the office space like pluméd peacocks. They really don't do anything except call on you when you raise your hand at your desk to ask permission to piss, leave early, or take a vacation day to take care of a sick kid. They say that they are there to evaluate a worker's performance but it has already been shown over and over in research that the best form of performance evaluation is a self-evaluation.

III. If the Republican Party really wanted to get the working class and women on their side and undermine the progressive, Woke Left forever, they would make moves toward establishing through legislation a mandatory four-day work week. Deconstruct the Monday to Friday construct. A four-day work week may become necessary as AI takes over the tasks that people were once needed to do. That extra day could provide more leisure time for people. Mankind deserves more leisure after almost 150 years of toiling for the upper classes.

 Mimesis is the highest form of flattery. It's how we idolize the past; a form of ancestor worship. The Woke Left would say that it's simply a veneration of dead white men. I'll take Bach over Bad Bunny any day.