If anybody follows this blog, they surely noticed I didn’t post last night, either. My excuse was primarily capitalist. Since Thanksgiving, I’ve been trying to get by with 1-3 hours of sleep a night. Out of deference to paying customers, I set up two computers on the floor at home and cat-napped between them when I had to. I put in my time at the office, but the phones and internet were down most of the time, necessitating long lunches on my part. After the snow storm, a key employee got snowed in, and we got hit with a huge order. I was already swamped. I had to split my time between two offices, one of which had no power. I could only work there for two hours at a time before fearing frostbite. I had to park my car six minutes from the lab/shop because of the snow, and still got stuck three times. The most obscene part of the adventure was carrying the computer with the customer database through a snow-covered forest to hook it up to a live source of power. It took about 35 minutes. The forest was so much faster than the slolum mountain roads, and I had to hurry to meet the printer who was staying late on my behalf. Jerry Gmyr and his friends at Advantage Printing made many concessions to comply with the unreasonable demands I was making of them. I was shaky and frazzled after three days of carrying heavy boxes in the snow, and cracked my knee on the concrete carrying the printer. The day before we closed, everybody in the office was working to fill the order, including the little girl of one of the directors. The UPS man made an extra stop on his way back to pick up the order, and the folks at the post office stayed 25 minutes over to process the mailing. We managed to fill all outstanding orders before leaving for Christmas break.
When I woke up this morning, I couldn’t move my back. So, for two hours, I had lots of time to think. I thought of all the capitalists across the country who work so much harder than I had just done. I thought of my auto mechanic, Rikk at Charlotte Street Gulf, who would be working on Christmas eve. I thought of all the mechanics with bummed up hands and scars to show for their labor. I contrasted it to the folks hanging out in the sunshine outside the missions downtown. Some Christmas, I want to do a welfare project for working class people who endure pain every day to produce things to keep our economy going.
Then, I had an epiphany. I realized that if every person in Congress was so stupid as to not realize economies need producers; intelligence agencies, think tanks, and other organizations with the ability to infiltrate, indoctrinate, advise, or withhold contributions, understood Economics 101. I was at peace with an assurance that so many elected officials could not possibly be so stupid or drunk-blind with power to nationalize healthcare – for now.
