[ID: Tweet by @/MichellCClark that reads “sending love to everyone who wants to do better but can’t find the energy to make the necessary changes. sending love to everyone who wonders if their exhaustion is permanent. sending love to everyone who’s tired of feeling stuck.” /end ID]
Web weaving on" To love and to be loved , to want and to be wanted"
{Words by: Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals; p. 165/Emily Palermo, What I Could Never Confess Without Some Bravado, published in Rising Phoenix Review/Haruki Murakami/@chaandajaan on Tumblr/desperation sits heavy on my tongue, @tullipsink / images: Pinterest}
People who don’t do or create shit are always the most critical because they have no frame of reference. They severely underestimate how much energy it takes, how much fear and other psychic burdens need to be overcome, the sheer amount of relentless persistence, faith and self-belief it takes to put something, no matter how feeble and shitty, out in to the world.
It seems so easy just looking. “I could do that”. “I could’ve made that”. Well then do it. Look at the most feeble and easy looking creative work and then replicate it in your own way. And with no irony or hiding or joking- in all sincerity put your name on it - and show it to others. People you know in real life. As a representation of yourself. See how it feels. You’ll have a new appreciation and softness towards creative friends and strangers.
i think popular media culture is poisoned in the following ways:
if you like something, people will make fun of you because you have admitted to experiencing a sincere emotion. this makes people defensive about what they like.
if you don’t like something, people will take your opinion personally and attack you. this makes people feel like they have to have a very good reason to dislike something.
people reach for reasons to like vs dislike things that are serious and often politically relevant so they can defend themselves from other opinion-havers.
these positions mutually reinforce each other until it is assumed that any declaration of liking or disliking something is both personally and politically relevant by default.
i am forced to look at this every time one of my fandom posts blows up.
never getting over how genuinely distressed tai lung looks when po does his shuffling trick. mid fight this man stops and panics because he cant figure out a childrens magic trick
“Oh [other profession] wants better working conditions? WELL [MY profession] is HARDER I work TWENTY HOUR DAYS and I am NOT ALLOWED BREAKS and I’m PAID FOR SHIT and I have NO INSURANCE and I NEVER SEE MY CHILDREN so WHY are YOU COMPLAINING LOL”
have you considered that maybe YOUR job ALSO should not suck that much
Story time. This is not so much for OP but for anyone else who might not have union experience: Bear in mind that there is a strong propaganda effort to get people to this viewpoint. They’re not being willfully obtuse.
I spoke to a neighbour the other day. She’d just taken voluntary a lay-off from her factory job because she had an ongoing injury and they wouldn’t let her adjust her hours in a sensible way. She’d been struggling to make it work anyway but her back was getting really bad. So when they put the word out that they were looking for volunteers to take lay-offs, she put up her hand. Still, she was proud to tell me that she was considered one of their best and fastest workers, even with the injury. She was frustrated that one of the newer workers seemed to have gotten various accommodations, even though that worker was nowhere near as good.
I could tell that she’d been having similar conversations with her coworkers on the factory floor for years. Who got extras they didn’t “deserve.” Who was a shoddy worker and made life harder for everyone. Who came in to work even though their parent had just died to make sure that nobody had to pick up their slack. And all of that pervaded with propaganda about “greedy unions” who slim down your already-skinny paycheque just because they’re all lazy slackers who don’t want to pull their weight and don’t appreciate the nice boss for hiring them. (This is the same across all types of jobs. Next story time I’ll talk about two university profs who grew to fame and fortune via unions and the social safety net and yet both engaged in union busting.)
My neighbour’s injury, incidentally, was a result of her work at the factory, but she didn’t want to try for compensation or anything else. She’d “never taken a single sick day in 20 years” and wasn’t “the kind of person who made waves” so she was just going the regular unemployment route but finding the systems obscure and challenging. She was hurt and shocked that her old employer would treat one of their best workers this way and leave them to deal with the fall-out by themselves.
Meanwhile, Canadian (federal) government workers were striking in Ottawa. And she expressed frustration that they felt “entitled to strike” when the (provincial) services she was accessing were so shoddy and difficult to navigate. Why did they “get to” strike if their work was apparently so poor? She had no sympathy for them.
I pushed back gently. Her factory floor job wasn’t union, but the admin staff was union. They seemed to get a better deal. We spoke about strength in numbers, and how hard it is to try and get your due from your employer without anyone to help you. And how they make all these forms complicated on purpose so it’s easier to deny you money or other support. And how it would be great to have someone to go to meetings with you, who knew all the legal stuff, and who could help you with the forms, and get you the money for the medical services you needed.
She wasn’t pro-union by the time I left, but we’d agreed on a few things, and I’d framed a few of her concerns in a way that made her more ambivalent about strikes (rather than outright hostile). Still, as we were saying our goodbyes, she said, “let’s hope they hurry up and get back to work eh!”
Because imagine what it would cost her to turn around and agree that unions are good, and strikes are good, and you should fight your employer for your fair compensation and your rights. Twenty years of taking no sick leave, working herself to the bone on not enough money, laid off and struggling with the system for basic support. She’s proud of her suffering, all the times she didn’t complain, all the times she pushed on even as the going got harder and harder.
Because if she can’t be proud of it… then what? She’s dumb for taking a non-union job? She should’ve organised and could’ve had better pay and a severance package and free physiotherapy for life? If she accepts that unions and strikes are good, she’s still in pain, still unemployed, still stuck with her lack of support, but now also feels like a fucking idiot for giving 20 years of her life to a boss who threw her out without a second thought.
So. Don’t put up with union busting and do talk to the people in your life about solidarity, but do realise that being anti-union isn’t just folks being aggressively wrong for the sake of it. They’ve been lied to. And they possibly have a lot of complex grief and identity and other experiences tied up in this.
“If she accepts that unions and strikes are good, she’s still in pain, still unemployed, still stuck with her lack of support, but now also feels like a fucking idiot for giving 20 years of her life to a boss who threw her out without a second thought.”
This.
And this applies to a lot of other things you might want people to change their minds about.
Nothing makes your native language feel foreign like having speakers of another language look at it a bit too closely in the way you do when words are new & intriguing entities instead of transparent conveyors of meaning. It’s delightful. I saw someone explain that rendez-vous is the 2nd person imperative of the French verb “se rendre” = to go (somewhere) and “dépareillé” (mismatched) comes from the word ‘pareil’ (same) so rendez-vous is just “you go (there)” and our word for mismatched is just “unsamed” and as a French speaker it was so destabilising. I had never looked at the word dépareillé and thought ‘unsamed’ in my life, it felt dignified and whole until you poked it. My English speaking cousin asked me what was our word for memo and I said “pense-bête” and he translated “think-dumb? we say memorandum and you say think-dumb?” and I was like nooo stop doing this
Anonymous
