Going Postal

Yup, I was hired by the United States Postal Service this week.

I know, WTF am I thinking, thought you were opposed to the FedGov, how the heck did they hire YOU if you are as radical as you say?

Well, bluntly, there are danged few jobs in this area.
The school district where I am employed didn't give anyone but the teachers contracts of employment this year. They are going to have to make cuts - and rather than cut a teacher who makes $50,000 a year plus full, completely paid for family benefits, they are going to cut a couple of low level staffers without benefits,  whenever they see fit, to balance the budget.

To this end they have cut the school year by 8 weeks; by both cutting off two weeks at the beginning and going to (mostly) four-day weeks throughout the year - but increased the daily hours for students to attend to 8 AM to 4 PM. This means that I get to work 4 10-hour days; one hour before school starts and one hour after. Um, Yay. I get to leave for work in the dark and come home in the dark, 4 days a week, all winter long. Also, by cutting off the days at the beginning of the school year, they've  cut me out of a whole month's pay.  Not to mention that the latest superintendent accosted me the last time I came in to tell me how much he trusted and admired me - and gave me still another job that one of his whiny, helpless, hapless (yet protected by union and tenure) teachers has refused to do for the last 3 years. About every 3 years I get a new boss - and each one is more arrogant, more misogynistic, and less cognizant of or concerned with the staff's jobs than the last.

Post office, I'll just be part-time - at first. Saturdays (3 hours) and then as a sub for the current postmistress when she's out. But next year,  due to contract negotiations with the unions, that will change, and I can work as many hours as I want. Also, from my date of hire (no matter how many hours I work in the year) it starts the clock of waiting - after a year, I'll be eligible for a mandatory week of vacation as well as medical insurance. Moreover, if I need more hours, I can sub at any PO in a 100-mile radius - or, if I'm happy with my paycheck and have things to do, I can stay home.

Let me think a moment... yeah, the school district is struggling to survive and getting ready to lay off workers and increase the burdens on those who remain, as well as kicking employees who do not have insurance to the curb so that they don't have to fund ObamaCare for them;  while the USPS will always have job openings, and are not looking to close this PO (too centrally located), and are contracted to provide, not merely vaguely promise, insurance for all employees. Not to mention I'll be making a dollar more an hour to start, with guaranteed regular raises - when it has taken me 5 years to get up to my current salary at the school district office.

There is no ideal job, no matter what the Obama-worshippers think. There will be shit work and crud to put up with. But no changing bosses every three years, no yearly threats of dismissal because of budget cuts, and no more dealing with other office workers'/teachers'/superintendents' personal problems that they drag to work with them every day, and take out on everyone else, because it's a 'helping', emotionally socialist environment, where the lower staffers are expected to put up with everyone else's angst, ennui, pretenses, delusions, and foibles. (Can't tell you how many times in the past 5 years I've had to put up with out-and-out temper tantrums from highly unprofessional  'professionals'.) No more emotional hemming and hawing, seeing and sawing, and demands that I "volunteer" my time because I am a lowly staffer and 'should work just as hard as the teachers' (who get paid for any extracurricular activity, above and beyond their salary). The new job won't be heaven. But it will be an improvement.

Vindication is a Sweet Pastry

Yeah, a lot of folks called me a Conspiracy Theorist when I told them that, thanks to the Patriot Act, there would be serious and egregious violations of the Constitution. I told them that the Bill of Rights would become the Bill of Permissions - where only certain people would have rights, especially their rights to speak freely and have their rights to privacy. I endlessly repeated Ben Franklin's quote - that those who give up their rights for security would have neither.  I was pooh-poohed and snickered at.  "That Could NEVER Happen Here - This is AMERICA!"

You may all bend over and kiss my ass now.

The only problem with being a Cassandra is that one is excoriated for what one predicts - even (and I should say, especially) when one is RIGHT.

Folks were derisive when I gave up my two cell phones for none. Didn't make much sense to have even one anyway - out here, you are lucky to hit a tower at all, much less have any bars. And 60 acres of untrammeled, non-wired peace is what I bought, on purpose.  Not to mention that I neither want nor need to be gotten in touch with constantly nor immediately. Nothing and no one is that important.

Yeah, I stay in touch with people thru FaceBook and emails, and yes, I know they are monitored, too. But - I never write anything I don't mean. Moreover, 20 years ago a group of friends and I published the list of 'FBI-words" (now, of course, they are HLS words) that the computers that recorded our transmissions would flag - and then we used the piss out of them. Damned straight. Our attitude then was "Yeah, so what? As an American I can say what I want!" Of course that is becoming less and less true - but let them come all the way out to Nowhere, Nebraska and say something, try anything. They won't. Out here I am a harmless ranting crazy old lady - and you betcherazz that's just the way I like it.

The time is fast coming, though, when people will have their income, jobs, and lives affected if they dare to raise a challenge to the omniscient, omnipotent juggernaut that we have created. "And he causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. " Check out those RFID chips, that are being touted as "The easy way to pay!" and "Protecting our children from being lost!" and even mandated in the endless pages of the Obamacare legislation. If you don't want the chip, and refuse it, can you produce your own food? Make your own clothes? Provide for yourself and your family with that little half-assed garden next to your house in that restricted neighborhood? Take care of yourself medically? I'm betting not. You'll knuckle and excuse yourself, just as you have always done. You'll have to, if you want to eat.

 And if you refuse to believe Cassandra on that as well - just wait. I don't give a damn what you believe any more; not going to try to sway you or influence you at all. Because you ignored me and others like me, or insulted us and made fun of us, you are about to reap what you so derisively sowed. You won't be able to come out here and kiss my ass, though - you'll be broke, restricted, and monitored.

And you'll deserve it. 

Extrapolation

• Did you ever wonder what caused 9/11? Really, truly, no pundits involved?
  My theory is that 3 things caused 9/11 - Welfare, the "dumbing down" of our
  children, and the Drug War.
  
  Bear with me a minute.
  
  There were other factors involved, of course - the fall of Russia, the
  socialization of England, Israel getting nuclear weaponry. It wasn't all
  our fault. And no, I'm not one of those ranting conspiracy theorists who think
  that there are a group of people, Skull and Bones, whatever, that rule the world
  and make all the decisions. Committees and groups of even the most like-minded,
  single-purposed types, just aren't that bright. Sorry, but they aren't. Those that do grasp cause and effect only see it dimly, temporarily, and with skewed perspectives. Those perspectives may be altruistic, or they may be purely selfish - but they are still human
  perspectives, with human failures and perceptions. There are no 12 or 18
  people up there in the stratosphere pulling the strings.
  
  What there are, is people who have what they think is a good idea and who
  have the (limited) knowledge to push it through - a legislature, public perception,
  whatever.
  
  Welfare was a good altruistic idea... on its surface. Save all those poor people from borderline starvation, help them so that they don't have to have gardens in the backyard just to survive the winters, so that they have more than one change of clothes, so that they can have the best start for their children available. Who knew that it would destroy the pride of the poor American families, that it would encourage once-strong families to split to get more money, that it would encourage teenagers as young as 10 to breed babies (liberals shut UP I've SEEN it) so as to bring more money into the household or to gain their 'independence' from a bad family, bad neighborhood, bad community? Who knew that people would lose their pride and self confidence to the point where they would lie, cheat, just to get an extra 20 bucks a month for which they didn't have to work? Who knew that folks would give in to their baser desires - sex, drug, alcohol, food induced stupors of overindulgence - just to get more money for which they did not have to work?
  
  Welfare weakened the society rather than strengthened it. Instead of raising up an 'underclass', it diminished it, paralyzed it, set it up for failure - and ready made excuses for that failure. It created more slums, as people who were given everything and worked for nothing became demanding, insisting that more and more was due them rather than using the handout to build something better for themselves, as Welfare was intended and was believed to be able to do. People in the slums destroyed any and everything - since they did not work for their homes, their food, did not have the satisfaction of achieving from their own hard efforts, they did not feel responsible for caring for the homes in which they lived, the children that they bred to satisfy the government qualifications, the partners that they chose to help them fulfill those requirements. They stopped taking care of everything around and attached to them - including themselves. Why not? The government would always provide more. Live for today, indulge any and every whim and vice, because someone else would always pay for it.
  Always.
  
  Bear with me a little more...
  
  Next and hand-in-hand with this was the dumbing down of our educational system.
  First math facts were thrown out the windows of the schools; "close" became
  good enough. Then the accent on "dead" languages and literature, history, basic psychology and sociology were tossed out, as educators determined that memorization was far superior to phonics, that there ws too much to teach and too much to learn as time had passed, so 'feelings' rather than facts were posted as truisms in children's minds. Why teach a child to learn throughout his life, when most children could not understand the reasoning process anyway, and they needed to learn only the basics supplied to them to establish a career?

Welfare made our children disposable, and education made them further understand that achievement and success were not predicated on their own efforts, but on the mutual efforts of everyone around them. Why try to excel when that made other children who didn't try feel badly about themselves? No, everyone must be the same; receive the same trophies and rewards as well as the same punishments. From both Welfare dependent parents and their own teachers, children learned that they were no better than anyone else, and that their lives were to be nothing but a series of endless satisfactions and indulgences. With these two altruistic and helpful policies, they set children up to indulge in drugs for escapism, as well as for profit and play. For what else is a brilliant yet uneducated child to do, who is not taught self-discipline and effort will result in rewards - but rather, taught by example that rewards come whether they are earned or not? These two social policies paved the way for - the Drug War.

For if so many American children and adults had not turned to so many drugs - to either blunt their own knowledge of their inabilities and inadequacies, or to sell to others to increase their profit and thence their feelings of worth, or even to gain a power denied to them by a lack of training or ability to meet lifetime educational, achievement, and life challenges - there would have been no real need for the Drug War. In every generation; even in ancient China, there have been members of the population who gave up their lives to addiction. Previously to the Drug War, these people were basically ignored or pitied or left to indulge their own vices, away from the general population ("opium dens") or taken care of quietly by family, friends, and pharmaceutical suppliers.

The Drug War changed all that. All drugs were deemed illegal; heavy fines and exacerbated prison time was given to sellers as well as users. But where were the main suppliers of the drugs?

Afghanistan. Asia. South America. Poor areas with no real income, eking out a living with their supplying local and home-grown addicts, suddenly had a world of opportunity in America, thanks to the increasing numbers of addicts to, as well as purveyors of, drugs. When the American judicial system made the drug war a priority, it set up the drug world to no longer be a place where those who indulged could live out their lives in their own private haze - it made them criminals, it made their world a violent and vicious place, it made the mere buying of a joint or a gram of coke dangerous. It also, because of the billions involved, made cops and judges and even juries susceptible to bribes. Justice was bought and sold, crimes that were only crimes against oneself were prosecuted far more zealously as crimes against other people.

The Taliban with all of its faults and extreme punishments and ways of life banned drugs, thought they were reprehensible. The only people who remained to fight them were the people who bought and sold and provided America with its ever-increasing demand for drugs. Americans were told that the Middle Eastern states were wrong, Muslim, hated us, and were evil. The CIA - long purveyors of the trade of drugs-for-weapons, instigators of dictators and unrest for political gain and the usurping of not only individuals but whole governments and countries, worked their magic. It was the US, after all, who put Saddam Hussein in power, given guns by the CIA. We were told "Well, if WE don't sell guns to them, then Russia or China will!" Yet the whole time these diverse tribes were playing one country against another, buying guns from The Big Three, using American drug money to buy Russian and Chinese armaments as well as American armaments. The CIA encouraged hyper-fanatical regimes and governments, thinking that they 'owed allegiance' to America - and only 'finding out' much later that these peoples' only allegiance was to themselves and the proliferation of their own ideologies. (Seriously, if they didn't know they were being manipulated to begin with, how really stupid could they be?)  As with the Welfare State, those poor peoples, made rich by the CIA's machinations, grew to resent American manipulation and infiltration of their economies and lives, and 'hated Americans'. Well, duh. They attacked us over 118 times before the WTC bombings - the Lockerbie plane bombing, numerous attacks on our embassies as well as on individuals and businesses, even the first WTC bombing, which few people remember or talk about, that was 'unsuccessful' (a garage bombing that didn't take down the Tower as planned). 

These people don't want us in their countries, taking all of their resources (everything from poppy fields to oil) and trading guns for power, then kicking successive self-built regimes to the curb. But their protests and demands go unanswered and unacknowledged. When they react with violence against 'innocents' from our and other '1st world' countries, they only see it as retaliation against the murder of their own innocents, caught between the CIA, Big Business, and Big Oil, as well as the power players in their own countries - power players who would never rise to power if they had not been supplied and trained by these same first-world countries.

That's not to say that I support the Taliban, Al Qaeda, or any other terrorist organization. But I do understand them, I do 'get' them.  Even now, on self-described "Patriot" websites, people are talking about killing the invading forces from China, the terrorists from the Taliban - taking up arms and defending America from the invaders. How is this any different from the Middle Eastern countries attacking our own soldiers, sent into their countries to protect their poppy fields and empower their dictators and terrorists?