Life Support

I hate to say it, but I watched another Dondementia speech again the other day. The one where he vowed to make the women of America safe and secure, so they didn’t have to worry their little heads about all of the horrible things in America.

And I’ve got to say this particular speech was the creepiest thing I’ve heard from Donnie.

So far that is.

It seemed to me that he was implying that once wrapped in his lecherous arms of protection, that the women of America could go back to baking apple pies, free of the burden of worrying about abortions and Mexicans.

It appears that Don believes that the women of America should be comfortable with him as their safety net, and one man support group.

I guess Donnie’s reached the conclusion that the Maga-maids find the concept appealing, and so I tried to calculate why that might be. Not only Don’s calculation, but the idea that women, or anyone for that matter would want to trade their autonomy for a concept of safety.

Don’s concept in this particular instance, which like all of Don’s concepts was a little short on details.

So, without going through all of the thought process that followed, I’ll summarize and say that I landed on life support. Very few people feel safe on their own, and so damned near everyone seeks out a supporting cast of characters to enhance their personal safety zone.

Life support, only without the tubes and shit.

Some people need occasional support, and some people need perpetual lifelong support. Some of the people that are placed on interminable life support are worthy. Like people that need assistance in breathing after an accident, and a wheelchair ramp and a service dog once you can breathe on your own. But, way too many people think they deserve support and I really don’t think they do.

In order to garner that support people need to believe that they’re a victim of some sort, and then convince the rest of the world that they deserve support because of that supposed victimization.

The good news about being a victim is that you don’t need to be hit by a car to qualify. In fact, with a little naval gazing it’s exceptionally easy to convince yourself that you’re deserving of some kind of an advantage to counter your perceived disadvantage. Once you get really good at it, then the next step is to assume that life support needs to be life long support.

The problem with lifelong support is that it has to be provided by someone else. So, essentially what’s happening is that an expectation of unending assistance means a necessity for someone or some agency to provide for you. As a result of the needs of the many, our society has evolved a system of provision that we call the service industry. We’ve then expanded on that concept by deeming some of that service as essential, because everything would go for a shit without essentials.

In order to not have service perceived as servitude, we compensate the persons or agency providing the service. The rate of compensation is then set by the availability of persons capable of providing a service, and by the amount of demand for that service. So, basically if the service you demand is deemed non-essential, then you have to pay. So, if my logic holds then a large portion of Americans believe that affordable, or god forbid, free health care, is not an essential service. Unless the nurses go on strike. Then it’s an essential service.

So, someone has to decide what exactly qualifies as an essential service.

Fortunately we have government to decide on what’s essential. Obviously there’s some disagreement from the parties involved over what essential means, and so we have representatives of different mindsets that we call political parties. Then they argue over who will be compensated with taxes paid by the citizenry. There’s all kinds of compensation to consider. Sometimes you get a bag of cash. Sometimes you get preferential service, and sometimes you get all the essential services provided to you or your business, but you don’t have to pay taxes. So free essential services as decided by the politicians for one reason or another.

It’s kind of complicated actually, but at least there’s a format that works some of the time.

In my opinion the bulk of the life support is provided by the people for the people. Some people are altruistic as hell, and seem to be programmed to constantly be support providers. But most of us don’t have the energy to try and save the world, and so we concentrate our support capabilities on friends and loved ones. That’s how every fucking society functions. We take care of, and provide support to our friends and to our families. We provide lifelong support because that’s what we’re supposed to do.

It doesn’t matter if we provide life support out of love, or obligation, or honor, or a combination of those things. The fact is that we’re programmed to survive as a species by taking care of each other. People show up to lift rubble off houses after earthquakes and they get in their bass fishing boats to rescue people from storm surges.

And what Donnie’s missing entirely is that no one expects the fucking guy to get in line to pass babies and granny’s into some dudes fishing boat. But what we should expect from our leaders is to admit that you know we seem to be having a lot of hurricanes recently, and to make sure we have the boats to take care of that shit ourselves.

That’s what the entirety of the service industry is all about. We’ve designed systems to provide life support. Hospitals and the police are life support. Grocery stores are life support. Firefighters and the military are life support, and the only job that politicians have is to make sure those systems are intact and functional.

Just give us the bloody tools and the opportunity to be able to provide our own life support.

But for some strange fucking reason we keep electing and listening to people that haven’t ever worried if they had the means to take care of the people they love. Felon Musk has like 30 kids running around with names that look like barcodes, but I can guarantee you that the fucker has not once worried about the price of milk or cereal. And it makes me wonder if that guy is the right person to put on a committee to decide anything for people that do care about the price sticker on a box of Cheerios.

Billionaires and tax breaks. Sweet Jesus give me a fucking break from that insanity. Those pricks should be lining up to pay taxes to support the infrastructure that supports the consumers that made them billionaires in the first place. But instead everyone just shrugs when the ex-president of the United States opines that only stupid people pay taxes, and his x buddy Elon moves a car factory to Texas because he didn’t think he should have to pay California taxes.

And then there’s the Weston family in Canada. These pricks who decided that the pandemic was an opportunity to increase their profits by 30 percent, while at the same time fighting a minimum wage for their workers, and straight up lying about meager profit margins because of supply chain issues.

And I’ve got to say that if there’s an essential role for government, then its an obligation to reel these greedy fucks in, and stop them from undermining our ability to provide life support for our families.

Somehow though, any mention of something as radical as price controls causes all of the capitalist’s to start spasming and screaming about socialism.

And I find that annoying as hell. It’s weird how we’re social people, we participate in social activities and the word society is derived from a gathering of social individuals. But if we add an ism to social then somehow the whole concept changes to some evil take away your rights communism bullshit.

Maybe we should change the term to societism, and while we’re renaming things lets call price controls something else too. Like maybe profit controls.

Because what we’re really talking about here is nurturing and protecting the systems that allow individuals to acquire the means to provide life fucking support. Food, water, housing and healthcare. That kind of shit.

That’s the job of government.

Give us that, and we’ll take it from there.

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