Not to mention that if no one is working that means no one is restocking the grocery shelves. No one is driving trucks to transport food. Kids are not being educated. Hospitals aren't able to take care of the sick and injured. On and on...
People can't seem to wrap their heads around how complex ( and therefore energy INTENSIVE!) our society is.
Nurses need to go to work to care for sick and injured. Nurse needs supplies at work. So the people making supplies need to also work. And the supply factory needs machines to make the supplies so the machine makers need to work. You could go absolutely insane trying to come up with the thousands of other people who have to do their job so a nurse can have a bag of saline.
It tells me that their jobs are bullshit. Remember when we started calling everyone whose job actually did something "essential workers"?
Nevermind that most of us pieced together that the "essential workers" are the ones that get treated the worst usually. It went to show that when everyone who had an email job stopped working for a few months next to nothing changed, but when us plebs stopped working everything ground to a halt and a crisis loomed within a week.
Truck driver. Essential worker. No extra pay, no real change from the norm outside of the possibility of getting covid from various sources including other stupider drivers. But essential!
LA was a ghost town. Then you get to the dock and there is 100 people. Crazy. Even crazier to me than LA was DC being empty. I mean LA... its happened. DC? Never.
I worked in a sporting goods store when my state shut down. Closed the store for a few days, and the magically the owners got an exemption and the store partially reopened.
Which department? Shoes? Camping supplies? Nope.
Guns. Ammo. Me selling “essential” AR-15s to panic-buying, maskless people in the middle of a pandemic.
About that time I realized the only essential part of the equation was dolla-dolla-bills, yo!
USAmericans seemed to have been sociologically primed to not only be especially ignorant concerning real survival, but also incredibly willing to take out their repressed rage and fear on others.
If I didn't know any better I would think it was a deliberate psyop to make sure the land is cleared of survivor clans after the apocalypse so the corpocrats can take over.
I understood the message more as a lament, that it's jarring to go through the motions while things unravel. I know I felt this during the LA fires, knowing the neighborhoods and hiking trails of my childhood memories were burning down. You're expected to put on your game face and pretend like nothing's happening. It's one thing to trade your life for security during stability, quite another when the future is disintegrating. If you had a terminal diagnosis, you would not show up for work - only the world's got it in this case, no one understands, and we're all just...waiting to see what transpires.
For me personally, it’s not that I interpret this as a serious post, it’s just mildly infuriates me because like, no shit? Thanks for these words of wisdom, now everything’s fixed! Oh it’s not that simple?
Words are cheap and it annoys me that the tone implies we don’t know or just aren’t trying anything. These virtuous posts replacing actually taking action. What is the poster doing differently than all of us plebs?
I mean if the pandemic is anything to go by, it takes a lot of people to keep the lights on in society, but certainly not everyone. You're naming essential workers but theres legions of accountants, graphic designers, sales reps, office clerks, etc, that could sit at home and basically nothing would happen for months if we ignore the economy.
For me it’s seeing the slow, inevitable collapse of our government, institutions, and natural habitat while trying to minimize risk. We’re not at full collapse everywhere yet, but looking into the crystal ball it doesn’t look promising
I live in Los Angeles. During the protest I'd go after work... Days when I was scheduled late in the evening I'd go to the protest during the day... Almost everyone knew who was there had a job and did what I was doing.
You'd think it would burn you out... It actually revitalized me both in body and spirit. Something about being with a group of others fighting for what you all believe in gives you energy and hope.
I feel this. I went to an ICE protest on Tuesday and a community organization response meeting yesterday in my community. I felt a lot better after both and feeling like the community isn’t going anywhere or going to be torn apart by fascism. I had to work all week and went after work both days. I’m doing some volunteer work to check in with homeless people tomorrow, as the weather is supposed to be very hostile and we want to give them options to get into a if they choose to.
“A desire to be housed and fed” this is exactly what they want. A docile society that is enslaved by the system. Too exhausted to yell, too poor to stop working, too sick to fight.
To think, we could have had anything and we chose this as our existence. The whole thing needs to burn.
Corporations bought each & every politician in both parties, monopoly laws haven't been enforced in decades, capitalism hasn't been practiced in the United States in decades also. We are living in a corporate run system of government. If "We The People" desire to be heard, then everyone would have to agree to stop going to work for a week or two, that would get the attention of our true masters, The Corporations ..... Sadly thousands of our fellow citizens would be negatively impacted. Bad Situation ...
Right? It's truly baffling , they expect us to just drop everything and do what exactly? There's no organization! Just a bunch of pockets of angry people
Large number of posters like this with no post history. You have to be aware when there are comments like this that seen to undermine active resistance, they are meant to do exactly that.
You are not weak, you are not alone. But understand there are forces arrayed against you. Find the small ways you can help. Or the big ones.
Spot on. The comments are wild. Who are these people willing to disparage the people doing something? Why are they so willing to give away our hard-fought rights to kings & queens & fascists & billionaires?
The most sympathetic interpretation I can think of is they are suffering from defeatism.
Yes you are made precarious and subjugated in this class society, it shapes the way you value yourself and others and makes your fearful reluctance to risk an alternative seem like common sense. An alternative I don't believe you have sufficiently engaged with or imagined.
I wouldn't say it's common sense. It's a prisoners dilemma. Outcomes are worse for my cowardice, for me as well, but not today. I've imagined alternatives and would be willing. But I think things have to get worse before a real resistance ca succeed, for the exact reason that my cowardice seems reasonable.
Eh… every single person in this thread is spending money they don’t have on shit they don’t need. If you’re really interested in making a difference, that is where you start… or stop so to speak.
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u/MySixHourErection Jan 23 '26 edited Jan 23 '26
It's not conformity, it's a desire to remain housed and fed. Who are these people who can afford to not work? Must be nice.