Stuck In The Middle Blues

A few items from the current headlines and from our personal life:

• Fourteen baseball players got huge suspensions and penalties for getting caught again using illegal performance enhancing drugs – the record books mean just about nothing these days since many of the current records were set by players who were or were suspected to be “juiced”.
• At our grocery store we’re now forced to either check out our own groceries (a process which fails more often than it succeeds and they only have one person to assist a dozen terminals as things go FUBAR) or wait in increasingly long lines caused by only having one or two of the eight regular checkout aisles open. Yet every couple of years we have to endure even worse service and even less selection when the union goes on strike, sometimes for months and months. Oh, and we now get a choice of either bagging our own groceries or taking even longer at checkout to wait for the groceries to be properly crushed by the union employees.
• We’ve got a dozen or more channels on our cable television that are now showing propaganda from Time Warner Cable – no CBS or Showtime or KCAL. They’re predicting that this particular little pissing contest might drag on for weeks, until the return of the NFL games gets consumers really, Really, REALLY pissed off instead of just really pissed off.
• At least we have the NFL this year. Last year we didn’t have the referees and it was a joke. A few years ago we didn’t have players and it was a bigger joke. The NHL season last year was cut to about half its normal length by a strike/lockout, and a few years ago those yahoos managed to cancel an entire season.
• In San Francisco, BART went on strike last month for several days, completely snarling the city. They went back to work for a month-long “cooling off period”, but that’s expired now and the only reason they weren’t on strike again this morning and again shutting down the city was because the governor stepped in. That will only buy a few days and then we’re right back to our brinksmanship.
• Congress. The White House. The state legislature. (Any state.) The city council. Does any one have any level of government that isn’t totally a partisan collection of completely incompetent buffoons? Doesn’t matter the party, doesn’t matter your affiliation. It’s the blind leading the blind, six of one and half a dozen of the other.

The common thread in all of these stories (and dozens more just like it every day) is that the common people, you and I, get the short end of the stick every single time.

Do CBS and Time Warner Cable lose anything significant in their dispute? Not really, and eventually they’ll come to an agreement that will be identical to the agreement they could have come to last week. But the little guy that just wants to watch television at night gets screwed.

Do any of the millionaire athletes or billionaire owners lose anything when they go toe to toe for months? You know better. But the devoted fans who live for the games turn bitter and disillusioned, while tens of thousands of minimum wage employees and small businesses who provide parking and tickets and food and security and cleaning and a thousand other things at the games all get to go unemployed. They’re missing meals, they’re losing their homes, they’re going broke – how many athletes or owners missed meals or lost their homes?

Same thing about the unions and the stores and the unions and the transit managers and the unions and the hospitals and… After months of angst, suffering, and sometimes violence, they’ll come to the exact same agreement that they could have done earlier to avoid the problem. Then they’ll both “declare victory” and claim that they did it “for us”.

That’s the salt in the wound.

Look at what CBS and TWC are telling the press, putting on billboards, and putting on full-page newspaper ads. Each side claims that they’re doing what they’re doing in order to help you and me, to protect you and me from the big, bad other guy.

BULLSHIT.

Maybe they’re so delusional and drowning in the corporate koolaid that they truly believe that. Maybe they’re truly so full of their own stupidity to even realize how blind and ignorant they are, something that’s only too clear to us.

Or more likely, they’re fully aware of what BS they’re spreading, and they’re fully aware that we know that they’re raining BS down on us – THEY JUST DON’T CARE.

We’re cannon fodder to them, the little guys stuck in the middle, and they can continue to redefine the limits of arrogance and ignorance. It’s just a game to them.

Politicians, labor leaders, civic leaders, owners, athletes, captains of industry – none of them care. It’s guaranteed that none of them are “leaders” by any definition of the term that I grew up with. If they were, they would solve the problems before they became crises. They would work their butts off to make it better instead of deliberately making it worse.

Yeah. Let’s wait for that to happen. Can anyone name the last time that one of these “leaders” did his or her job and actually “led”, actually solved problems, actually got their job done and earned their millions and billions?

Maybe if 500,000 cable subscribers this month didn’t pay their bill and turned in their cable boxes, would that get their attention? If a couple million voters signed recall petitions and demanded there be a “None of the Above” option on the ballot, would Congress notice? If the baseball, football, basketball, hockey, and soccer stadiums were 99% empty for a year or two and no one bought jerseys or memorabilia to put millions in the athlete’s pockets, would they wise up?

It’ll never happen. We don’t have any leaders who are supposed to be leaders, and we most certainly don’t have any leaders to lead the masses in the middle out of that rut and out of harm’s way.

I wish that I were wrong.

Freakin’ idiots.