...and we can make the most of it.
A more hopeful week than most in a turbulent time.
This Week in Work: AJ’s Return to the Office
As I described in last week’s introduction, I have less a “career” and more a semi-consistent ebb and flow of gigs. At this moment in time, the one on which I spend the most time brings me here to a location I’ll refer to in this space as “Headquarters,” a Pacific Coast smoke shop whose social media account I manacan’t quite figure out funny yet, so this job is safe for now.
In any event, the social media management gig combines my core competencies in communications, PR, and as well as giving me over 20 hours weekly to process what the hell is going on around me…a luxury few in the working class possess.
Is it what I went to university for? Of course not, this job didn’t exist back then.
But, hey, that’s exactly the raison d’etre of this publication. I definitely didn’t expect my job to look this way 5 years ago. I bet you’ve said that sentence to yourself at some point as well. I’m also betting you’re not the type of person to let such fundamental shifts in the ways we work and live pass unexamined…or, put another way: you, working class hero, are our last best hope.
Cannot Be Unseen: Captain Planet Ain’t Coming
The recent environmental disaster in Ohio is perhaps the first major post-2020 demonstration of the lesson we should have all learned in the pandemic: your working class life has a hard dollar value, and it’s pretty low.
In case you haven’t heard--and a lot of people still haven’t!--a freight train carrying industrial chemicals derailed in a small town just west of Pittsburgh, resulting in the scene you see here.
After the crash, the chemicals were burned off in what Authorities called a “controlled release” but looked suspiciously like a massive explosion. The chemicals flared into the atmosphere in this way include compounds such as vinyl chloride, which you don’t have to be a chemist or record collector to understand you probably shouldn’t be taking massive rips of.
This snafu comes in predictable succession to last winter’s broken railroad strike, in which workers demanded radical concessions such as paid time off and adequate safety staffing. Of course, they were told by a purportedly left-wing national government to fornicate themselves and get back to work, and so many of them did just that. The problem was, not nearly enough of them did.
It’s what the railroad workers were trying to tell us but whatever, we’re here now…what kind of American’t needs more than 90 seconds to inspect the entirety of a train car anyway?
Putting aside that if a bomb train had derailed, combusting into burning toxic sludge and gassing several small towns along the way in some non-brand-name nation, your TV (or whatever magic glass rectangle advises you daily) would be telling you that the country in question was a butt-backwards, underdeveloped society on the brink of unending collapse.
But here in the good old US of A, you can just ignore all those dead fish and frogs…it’s not like rivers just flow across the continent, any resulting fallout will be sure to respect state borders.
Besides, it’s the Monday after the Consumerism Championship, a day on which the typical American gets more time off work than on a national election day…let’s not use this extra time to get political.
My takeaway here is that it’s someone’s job to clean all that up with their own human hands, no robots need apply…and so if you or a loved one live in the Eastern Ohio area and have been afflicted with mesothelioma in 10 years, please remember you read this post.
Maybe Update Your Resume: Teachers?
Before I set out to disparage their profession, let me just say that I have the utmost respect for what they do. For better or worse, it is a teacher who taught me to read and write. Through their guidance, they hold up our civic construct. There is no more practical example in our everyday life of the heroic self-sacrifice archetype we typically only apply to a guy with a gun.
All that typed, you can probably say “adios” to your favorite public school teacher before 2030.
This isn’t, like, a violence in schools segment…although, of the careers in which you could likely end up catching a slug, teaching typically has by far the worst pension plan.
This is about the reality that between shrinking pay, inflating class sizes, and the ever increasing likelihood that teachers in the US will start getting arrested for even mentioning that there was even a Trail, let along Tears along it, and you have yourself one of the world’s least desirable career paths.
Besides, who really wants to spend 10 years and six figures in school just to end up spending a perfectly good Tuesday night trying to decipher whether a 5th grader wrote their book report on “Animal Farm” using an AI?
Not you. Probably not anyone you know…so expect your kids to be taught by tablets.
Wait, you’re having kids? Bold move.
Talent Visa Tracker: Estonia
Here’s what anyone still holding on to the dream that one day the working class will enthusiastically flood back to overpriced American city centers missed the memo on: some of us have options now. Who lives in Detroit when they don’t have to?
Faced with demographic declines in the (perhaps fleeting) age of global mobility, many countries have elected to take the tried and true route to national prosperity: bringing in more people who can do cool and interesting stuff.
Estonia is one of these countries, offering an expedited path to residency for any qualifying individual who can prove income of around 5,000 USD over the past 6 months. They call it a “digital nomad visa” a term I hate for reasons I can explain later, f you can somehow find minimum age remote work, you’re somehow in there.
…and sure, I hear ya back there, heckling my newsletter. “But then you’d have to live in Estonia!” Rude…but I’ll humor you while we’re both sitting here.
As you may know, Estonia, along with a traditional culture celebrating community saunas and online voting, has EU membership, offering those with legal standing in Europe a commuting and travel experience not completely unlike traveling between different American states.
This means if you’re finding winter in Talinn a bit bleak and want to visit one of the more Instagrammable locales on the continent, it’s as simple as hopping on a train. Sure, travel times to more distant European cities may be over a day, but as an American it (actually) takes longer to get from coast to coast on Amtrak than it takes to get to the moon so I’m still pretty seduced.
Hope Spot: Power to The People
As the French people have long understood, there is nothing that keeps us warmer at night than the cozy radiance of solidarity…but electricity is a close second.
The latest round of protests aiming to prevent the national government from raising the retirement age (aka asking every 62-year-old in the country “could you cover the next shift?”) brought over 2 million to assembly as well as employing the electrifying tactic of redirecting power from private interests to public institutions.
You’ll rarely see such a masterful display of targeted disobedience and class awareness under our current systems. In the words of a protester, they struggle for the working class yet to come…it’s the kind of prenatal care we should really be able to get behind.
In stark contrast with the toothless placard parades that pass for protest in the US, The French embrace of direct action is frequently cited as a template for labor movements worldwide…turns out “just remove the guy’s neck” is a fairly effective immediate tactic to address an individual’s antisocial conduct, and in an age where a smartphone is an external organ, cutting the power is pretty close. Hard to ignore the will of the people when it decides whether you see tomorrow.
That spirit remains in their latest struggle to maintain worker rights, and to see it manifest in such an unmistakable form is cause for celebration…upsetting the social order shouldn’t be the first utensil we reach for, but it should always be on the table.
Good work if you can get it.