a little new year’s eve outrage

Okay, this bullshit makes me crazy.

Specifically, the commenters who are willing to blame the truckers for being a tiny cog in a completely broken system.  The same truckers who were robbed in 1980 of the option even to unionize, which in a just world would be, at the very least, an obviously violation of ‘right to free assembly’, right?

We keep blaming the wrong people.  The truckers themselves are working the side of the game board that was set up for them.  They didn’t invent this shitty system, they’re just living with it.  The government that enforces this bullshit is made up of crooks that WE put in office, and the modern robber-baron corporations are the ones that WE pay by buying their crap.

So just to get this straight: for every braying jackass who thinks the truckers should just go work elsewhere (flipping burgers?  Are you fucking kidding me?  Who’s going to deliver their restaurant supplies, then?), here’s an ethics assignment for you:  When you know that a large group of people are being taken unfair advantage of by a system, the least you can do is refuse to feed it.  Because unlike moving the problem from one misfortunate poor guy to a different one, it actually addresses the problem directly.  Your behavior as a consumer makes a bigger difference even than unionizing, because the Feds can’t pass a law (yet) that tells you where to spend your money, while they’ve been very effective historically at busting every attempt for workers to organize.

So if you said, “These people need to go get a different job,” in any form at all, here’s a social homework assignment for you: YOU go out YOURSELF and stop spending money at big box retailers – or any other place – that ships all their shit from overseas.  Buy locally made everything you can, or do without.

Oh, you can’t manage that?  It’s too much trouble, you say?  It’s impossible to find what you need, made locally or too expensive for you when you can find it?  Well halle-fucking-lujiah – you just figured out what it’s like to be a small cog in a system that is DESIGNED FOR YOU TO FAIL AT ESCAPING IT.  Welcome back to reality.  Jesus Tapdancing Christ.

But go ahead and make the small changes you can in where you buy things, because it actually does make a fucking difference.  Yes.  It really does.  Half the city of Portland proves that it really does work.