May You Live in Interesting Times

If you know why this picture goes with the post title, you should go get an AARP card -- 20% off the whole check at Denny's!

I only learned recently, from Wikipedia, that "May you live in interesting times" is a curse.  More specifically, it is said to be an old Chinese curse, although the only known sources of the phrase appear to be British.  The idea is that interesting times mean change and turmoil, so boring times would be more comfortable.

When I was young, I always felt like the half-generation before me lived in more interesting times than we did.  If you graduated from high school between 1962 and 1968, more or less, you were in the middle of a decade of really radical social change.  There was the civil rights movement, anti-war protests, riots, political assassinations, long hair, sex, drugs, and rock and roll.  Those people changed this country.  By the time I graduated in 1975, the Vietnam War had ended, Nixon had resigned, and Gerald Ford was President.  They had Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King, and The Graduate.  We had streaking and John Denver.

But now I think the times have gotten a bit more interesting, and this is why:  We have two very old dominant political parties in this country, and I think soon, within the next generation, one of them needs to go.  The rational people of this country are so at odds with the Republican Party that I don't think we can continue to coexist anymore.  The Republican party needs to be destroyed, burned to the ground, wiped out of existence, and replaced with something more viable.  I don't mean that we have to burn their offices and hang their politicians; the model I have in mind is the Dixiecrats.  There are still a few adherents out there, but they are marginalized to the point that they don't run for office, and almost everyone realizes that they have nothing of value to say.  No one talks about them anymore.  Republicans need to be brought to that point.

And here's why:  We need to have intelligent discussion of political issues in this country, different ideas, solutions for our problems.  And I don't believe that what the Republican Party has to offer right now includes intelligent discussion, ideas, or any solutions.  They are, to put it succinctly, nuts.

Just a few quick examples:  Suppose I am a Democrat sitting down with one of millions of Republicans across the country to find a solution to some problem.  Like more than half of Republicans, this one thinks that global warming is a hoax.  Like about half of Republicans, this person believed, maybe still believes, that Barack Obama was not born in this country and is therefore not legitimately President.  Like about half of Republicans (52% in one poll), this Republicans believes that ACORN, a relatively small organization that worked to register minorities to vote, stole the 2008 presidential election, apparently stealing millions of votes across the country.  In fact, like 48% of Republicans, this one believes that ACORN also stole the 2012 election, even though ACORN had ceased to exist a couple of years earlier.

Am I supposed to discuss something serious, like the deficit, with this idiot?  I can't.  I just don't have any faith that anything he thinks or says has any basis in reason or reality.  My political counterpart is what I like to call "functionally stupid."  He may have a high IQ, but it doesn't do him any good, because he refuses to think rationally, making it hard to distinguish his ideas from those of someone who is truly too mentally challenged to understand any better.  I can't trust that anything he says will be anything other than utter bullshit, leaving me to try to evaluate both his thoughts and mine.  I might as well just leave him out of it.

As a practical example, Republicans are vehemently opposed to the Affordable Care Act.  Honestly, I don't personally know all there is to know about the law.  Still, when Republicans criticize the law, it sounds to me like their usually BS.  More than likely, people like Karl Rove know that the law will help people and be good for Americans, but it is his job to convince the conservative masses that everything Democrats and Obama do is terrible.  While he gets rich laughing at them, the Fox News watchers and Rush Limbaugh listeners mindlessly follow along, learning to hate the law because, uh, Socialism!  Any discussion of actual ideas is lost.

I have more thoughts about this, but I'll save those for another day.

Last Day, Again

I suppose something is wrong with me.  I don't think I will try to change that though.

Maybe it's because I was harassed too many times by other kids in school.  With a July birthday, I was one of the youngest in my class each year, and there were always a few bigger kids with IQs about 40-50 points lower than mine who would bother me.  Or maybe it was my mother.  Mom could be very negative sometimes.  Freud would say it was Mom.

In any case, I reached a point somewhere in my life, long ago, when I decided that I really didn't have to ever be treated like shit again by anybody, ever.  I'm kind of sensitive to that.  I fight back when I'm treated poorly, or I walk away.  This brings me into conflict with the corporate world, where treating employees like dirt is seen as a right handed down by God and is built into the HR handbooks. 

I left another job on Monday.  It was kind of winding down anyway, but I wound it down a little faster.  My boss had fallen into a mode of judging everything I did by how fast it was, trying to make sure that the company was getting maximum impact out of every dollar they spent on me.  The problem is, you can't supervise a senior accountant by trying to measure output per hour, any more than you would try to measure a lawyer or a novelist that way.  Not me anyway, not for long.

This had been going on for a few days, so I arrived at work ready to call it quits if it continued.  Things started out well; I was working down a list of reconciliations.  Then around noon my boss decided that she personally needed to be sure that she was getting the absolute most bang for her buck, so she  asked what I had been working on and suggested particular items I could complete.  Then she made the mistake of asking what exactly I had accomplished that morning and how long each item had taken.  Then she asked how I had gone about it, suggested that there was a more efficient way, said that we needed to do everything as efficiently as possible, and told me I needed to think about these things.  Mistake, mistake, mistake.  You kind of crossed the fine line there between supervising a professional and treating them like a teenager on their first day picking orders in an Amazon warehouse.

I was, I suppose, humiliated, although I'm not sure that's exactly it.  I was most certainly pissed off; I'm sure of that.  So at the end of the day, I told her that Friday would be my last day.  She asked why.  Maybe she should not have.  I told her, word for word as well as I can remember, that the next time she asked me what I had just been doing, how long it had taken, and exactly how I had done it, I would walk out mid-sentence.  And of course that was the end of that.

She was surprised.  She seemed not to grasp that I might not like being micromanaged, redirected and admonished on a daily basis.  But I think also that employers are simply not used to employees who feel they have a choice.  People just take it, because they figure disrespect is built into their pay.  I don't do that so well.