Americas Backbone

You have plenty of people punching key boards and starring at monitors in air conditioned offices. Who commute from their air conditioned homes in their air conditioned cars. They wear clothes totally in appropriate for the weather, sometimes going for months without breathing more than a few minutes of fresh air. Some even, go to air conditioned gyms to workout, while breaking just a little sweat.

You have people who never leave their homes or apartments to work… and you have a large number who really do no work of any kind. They use money to make money.

 There is  the American Working Class. Real people, breaking a sweat all day , everyday. In this day and time its mainly made up of immigrants (legal and illegal).

They deal; with all the trash everyone creates, most of it needlessly. The non-working class generates far more than the rest .Our sewers are operated and maintained by workers who endure filth, odor, and heat and cold, for all of us.  Meat processors, killing cutting and dealing with an awful mess. Every time you eat chicken, someone has slaughtered, disemboweled, plucked and processed the meat that goes into your mouth. And usually in God-awful conditions. A lot of the  vegetables you eat, are hand picked for extremely low wages.. some even picked by laborer’s kids working extremely hard and long hours. Thought child labor was illegal? Think again! It happens right here in the USA. These are not family farmer’s kids either.

 I could go on for ever talking about the people we use in our society to give the rest comfort and safety and full bellies. But all have usually one thing in common, low earnings. Because everyone wants so much, and doesn’t want to pay anything for it, we basically enslave these people to horrible working conditions for an income that doesn’t allow them to enjoy a lot of what some of us might consider necessities..

 The reason a lot of these jobs are held my illegal aliens or people from other countries, is just not that their lousy jobs. “WE” don’t want to pay enough to get those jobs done by anyone else. Employers want the most profit they can get, so they would prefer to hire illegals who can’t complain about bad working conditions, unsafe environments etc. They can cheat them on their pay, threaten them with deportation and basically do to them things that could never be done to anyone else without suffering the consequences.

 People say “no one else will do these jobs”.. true, but not because they are bad jobs.

It is because we don’t value those jobs. We consider people who work using hands and backs as inferior. Who is willing to take work that is dangerous, disgusting if all they get out of it is a horrible wage , no benefits ( or very little) and no hope for the future?

Only people who have even less to look forward to. But if those working environments were made safer, cleaner and more humanizing, all it would take is enough money for two people to survive on… and have a little left over from each check. But that is where we share responsibility along with employers.

 Everybody wants so much stuff it has to be very cheap and the pressure from corporations for profit is so great, it has to be even cheaper. Society’s addictions, cravings and greed condemn millions of people everyday to poverty, no future, and a meager existence to survive.

What is causing us to be so exploitive and so uncaring? So unconscious of those around us? Is it pure selfishness and greed? Is it ignorance?