Christmas 2022

Instead of a poem last year, I wrote a song. 

Careful What You Ask For

 Yesterday, I was asked to sign a petition to eliminate the Massachusetts subminimum wage.  Since I am a New Hampshire resident, I did not sign, but as similar efforts are sweeping the country, it is just a matter of time before the movement comes here. My reaction? The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

My arguments come from experience. In the 1980’s, I was a low-skilled high school dropout living alone. Serving was the best opportunity I could find. It was instant cash and, typically, at least one free meal. I did not always make good money, but the overall result skewed towards a livable income. My paycheck? I never opened the envelope.

In the 1990s, I went to college. Pell-grants paid for my tuition and waiting tables paid for everything else. It was perfect. I had time to study while still covering my expenses. In addition, it was flexible. During finals week I worked less, during the summers I worked more.

For ten years after I graduated, no matter what I was doing, I had a serving job, too. It provided instant income. I did not have to wait two weeks or, increasingly, a whole month for a paycheck. Speaking of paychecks, I was still throwing the one from the restaurant away.       

Just last year, when my income was not meeting my expenses, I applied for several server positions. As it turned out I did not need to return, but it was nice to know I could.  

Over the span of thirty years, I worked in many kinds of restaurants, from greasy spoons to exclusive culinary destinations, from casual chains to mom and pops. I met people who were serving for all sorts of reasons. Some were “moonlighting”, some were transients, and some were professionals. Some were high-school students working their first job, and some were recent immigrants navigating their way in a new culture. Some were single parents, and some were bored empty nesters. There was not one demographic that neatly described the population, but we all had one thing in common: we loved the cash and ignored our paychecks. Our grumpier bosses told us the only reason we had jobs was because of the subminimum wage. It seemed like a win-win.  

Enter the well-meaning to save the day, and away we go, down the road to hell.

The first stop?  The eccentric road-side diner. Since the restaurant industry runs on small margins and it takes years to become profitable, the tipped wage is a major factor making entry plausible for the independent operator. Eliminating it, I fear, will be a tremendous barrier for these types of businesses. The big chains, however, will be just fine.

That brings us to the second stop on the road to hell.  Big chains are already responding to systemic change by exacting more control over the servers’ income. In addition, I am sure there will be plenty of loopholes and workarounds to take advantage of, and, ultimately, the server will be worse off.  But the simplest way around paying a person a higher wage? Automation.

Every step of the serving process, except maybe bringing the food, can be easily automated. For an establishment with the resources, all that is required is an incentive, like increased labor costs, and there you have it: an obedient machine that doesn’t need a wage. Server Unit 345 also comes with added benefits. It will not sneak off for cigarettes, require breaks, wear inappropriate attire, call in sick, bicker or complain.  I know we expect restaurant owners to be enlightened and employ people for the greater good, but most are practical. They will ride this trend directly to automation. Server jobs will still exist, but they will be much harder to find.     

Last stop on our road to hell is the dead, downtown pub.  Dining out is already becoming the purview of the wealthy. If labor costs increase, employers will pass those costs onto customers. The individual server may be getting paid more, but what of all the working-class would be diners? We’ll be stuck at home eating beans out of a can.

I support efforts to help working people, like unionization and the living wage. I also think labor, overall, should be valued more in society.  However, instead of focusing on a system that is not really broken, let’s promote ideas that might result in real benefits, like the Basic Minimum Income.  Now there is an exit ramp I can get on.

 

The Killing of Cats

The heatwave surged
As predicted.
But the people didn’t wake
They complained:
“Give us more oil!”
Like the killing of cats
In the plague.

Silent Spring: The Sequel

A few years back I was finally able to purchase a small piece of property in New Hampshire with the intention of devoting it to my favorite group of wild animals: the arthropods. I don’t mow or rake, removed most of the outdoor lighting, built a pond habitat and planted native flowers. It took a few years to get it going, but this summer it is in full bloom, and it is a beautiful mess: my very own nature sanctuary, alive with buzzing, flying, ticking and stridulating, an organic orgy of offensiveness to the human desire to control and contain.  But hold on. Wait a minute. Where the heck is everybody? I stare at the bewildered blossoms in anguish. There is simply nobody there.

Okay, I’ll admit it, I’m exaggerating.  A few bugs, bumblebees, or thread-waisted wasps stumble by occasionally and a handful of frantic moths flitter up my kitchen window at night. However, the overall reaction to my humble effort to support the most maligned and misunderstood group of animals in the world? It can only be described as pathetic, and I’ve been on the planet long enough to know that it isn’t normal.

You see, I was a born arthropod enthusiast. As a child I would spend most of my swimming time, in the face of great ridicule, heroically rescuing drowning insects.  On road trips, when my father pulled over cursing to cleanse the windshield of sticky green hemolymph, I would wander off to the streetlights in search of Luna moths and Dobsonflies. They were everywhere. At night, in the suburbs, our lighted windows were just teeming with segmented critters of all shapes and sizes. They were prolific, incredibly diverse and seemingly invincible.

Later, I went to school for entomology. Even then, in the 1990s, insects were so easy to find that I was able to assemble a passable collection a week before it was due. Now? I would probably earn a D-.

But don’t take my word for it. This is not just local, temporary or anecdotal. Insects are in dire straits all over the world and the consensus is in: the main culprit is not climate change. It is habitat destruction and pesticides. As our population inevitably expands, we take more land for ourselves and leave less of it for the rest of the species that share our planet.

This is not something that is going to happen, it is happening now. It is happening everywhere. People, this is the sixth major extinction event, and it is human caused: Silent Spring, the sequel.

Climate change is a crisis and biodiversity loss is a connected, but essentially separate one. We cannot, in our important efforts to transition to a green economy, ignore our impact on biodiversity. We cannot continue to rip apart forests and pave everything over while erecting solar and wind farms or destroy habitat mining metals for electric cars.

There are many selfish and practical reasons to be concerned about this problem, but I’m only going to present one: as go the arthropods, so goes the rest of nature. I imagine there are people out there who would say: “So what? Humans will survive. Who needs nature? We’ll live in a barren, desolate landscape and eat cockroaches for lunch. They’ll still be around.”

However, if you’ve ever been struck by a bird, dragonfly, frog or snake; If you’ve ever watched the itsy-bitsy spider climb up the waterspout; if you’ve ever caught a glimpse of a tiger beetle and just been dumbfounded by its beauty. Even if you’ve ever gotten a butterfly tattoo: you have some connection to nature, and you have some reason to care.  

The good news is that nature is resilient. Together, we may be able to pull it back from the brink, but it is going to first require an immediate and massive adjustment in the way most of us think. A shift from a mindset of destruction and control to one of creation and relinquishment needs to occur. We need to take radical action, but, more importantly, radical inaction.  At every level:  industry, government, and in our everyday lives, we need to find value in biodiversity, embrace it,  and then, after that, we need to leave it alone.  

Wisdom

 Then came the toxic gas.
A few weeks after the Arby's manager
got locked in the walk-in and froze to death. 
Long since the scaffolding of the scared, zig-zag mind
had been erected and
way before the lonely languor of the last butterfly. 
The gas came defecating through the border stalls, 
A  waste product 
Of human stagnation. 

Advocate for yourself!

You must crawl around the office with staples on your knees,
Do cartwheels on the copier
Or lick my shiny shoes.
You have to pay your dues!
 
If you want a raise, you must show praise,
Some fucking gratitude.
Roll over on your back
So I can defile your bulges of fat
with sticky notes and thumbtacks.
 
I see you every day,
In your Goodwill casual,
Thinking you can get away
With just doing your job well,
Showing up on time,
And punching out at five.
 
You clueless clod.
The world belongs
To those of us who know
How to put on a show.

Open letter to the American Meat Eater

Animals feel pain and have some level of self-awareness. They have individual personalities and emotions. They experience fear. It is true that a pig can’t do math problems, but neither can your two-year-old. Intelligence has little to do with suffering. Fear and pain are not advanced cognitive states.

Look at your dog or cat. What makes a cow, pig. or bird any different? Put your beloved pet in the place of a suffering animal. For this exercise, I’ll avoid some of the most horrific things we do to animals but imagine being mutilated without anesthesia, stuck in a trap, or spending an entire life in a cold metal cage only slightly larger than the body it contains.   

Stop the blatant denial. Stop disassociating that slab of meat on your plate with a pain-feeling, self-aware organism. The reason vegans at the dinner table make you uncomfortable is not because they are self-righteous and smug. It’s because, deep down, you know they are right. You don’t want to face this eye blinding truth because you have invested so much. You’d have to admit that you’ve been living a lie and enabling savagery. Fess up so society can move forward.  

Now that we’ve covered that, let’s go a little further. Wild animals also have nervous systems. They can feel pain and have some level of consciousness.  A fox, a skunk, a mouse, even a snake.  Too far? I would go to the lobster level, but I don’t think you’re ready. You might start accusing me of being absurd. For now, let’s stick to animals with feathers and fur.

By the way, plants do not have nervous systems. I’m not sure what is happening with plants, but they do not have pain receptors and they do not have brains. Stop making false equivalencies between cows and cabbages and declaring that that takes care of it. A cabbage does not play. A cabbage doesn’t have a personality. It doesn’t feel pain and it is not self-aware.

Animals need to have their basic needs met and that is more than just food and water. One of those basic needs is space. Another is to be free from torture. A third is social interaction. These are not outrageous demands. No reasonable person is claiming that chickens should have access to the internet. Chickens don’t care about the internet. They just want to scratch around in the dirt, stretch their wings and make funny noises.

Animal rights and human rights are not an either-or proposition. In fact, they are the same. All animals have a right to a full life, and this includes humans. A full life for a cow is not the same as a full life for a human, but we have some needs in common. Examples would include food, water, space, social interaction, and freedom from torture.

I know that nature is cruel, but this is not an excuse. Unlike mother nature, humans have agency and empathy. We can do better. Being more intellectually advanced does not give us permission to be cruel. In fact, I’d argue, it gives us a mandate to be kind.

Animals feel pain and have some level of self-awareness. They have individual personalities and emotions. They experience fear. I’m not telling you what to do about it, I’m just asking you to accept it. The collective cognitive dissonance must be broken, or we cannot have any meaningful action on animal rights.