im 12 years old sitting on my bed reading it’s midnight it’s summer my window is open the crickets are very loud but very soothing my room smells dusty and warm and no one else exists. im 12 years old. the feeling never goes away.
“But all the magic I have known
I’ve had to make myself.”
—Shel Silverstein, Where the Sidewalk Ends: The Poems and Drawings of Shel Silverstein (via alittlebitoflace)
“I need something different. I don’t know what it is, but I need something new.”
—(via deeplifequotes)
USA Today undertook a year-long investigation into southern California truckers, so-called “independent contractors” who form a critical link from America’s busiest port to the rest of the country, and found that drivers are sunk into deep pits of debt due to predatory contracts they signed under duress, debts that are used to force them to work unsafe hours, falsify their work records, and sometimes bring home literal pennies a week after working 80+ hours (some drivers even finish the week in deeper debt, owing money to the companies they “contract” for).
When these workers take their grievances to California’s labor board – with the help of the Teamsters Union – they are generally vindicated and awarded compensation, but the majority of the drivers lack the wherewithal to undertake such a grievance.
The companies whose goods these truckers move include some of America’s biggest brands, like J Crew, Ralph Lauren, LG, Home Depot, and Target, and these companies wash their hands of any responsibility for ensuring that their shipping contractors are not engaged in criminal, exploitative, systematic theft of wages and unsafe working conditions.
The current situation stems from a California rule that banned out-of-date, polluting diesel trucks from its ports. Trucking companies bought all-new trucks with better emissions profiles, then forced their workers to sign contracts through which they assumed all debt for this new fleet, with payments to be taken from their paychecks. The workers were made to sign on pain of immediate termination, without access to a lawyer or advisor, and many didn’t speak or read English well enough to understand the contracts.
The contracts allow the company to terminate the truckers’ employment at will, or to deny them shifts. Workers who miss any work, or a single payment, lose all the payments they’ve put into their trucks, and many report watching years’ worth of wages disappear at the stroke of a pen because they refused to go out on the road for 20 hour shifts, or took a few days off work for a parent’s funeral.
Desperate drivers take out second mortgages on their homes and borrow from relatives to make payments on their trucks, but a driver who falls out of favor with a boss can be “starved” out of his rig if the boss just refuses to give him any shifts – eventually, the driver will simply run out of places to borrow money for payments on the truck (and the drivers are contractually forbidden from driving for other companies, even if the company they work for won’t give them any hours).
The owners of the companies that USA Today investigated denied all this, and when USA Today presented them with documentary evidence, they stopped answering USA Today’s calls.
All else being equal I’m strongly in favor of transitioning away from trucking as a major form of transportation infrastructure, but in the meantime and in the transition it’s extremely important to take care that the workers displaced by those changes are taken care of.
This is corporations using clumsy environmental efforts to increase their stranglehold on the lives of their employees, and we need to fight that. We need to be on the side of the folks who lose their jobs when flawed or destructive infrastructures are phased out. Not in the sense of not ending those destructive practices, but making sure that those workers’ lives and freedoms are protected.
So they go around the world bombing and killing people and then expect us to feel sorry for them?? Nah son, you deserve it.
me if i ever find out any of my neighbors are veterans
Hmmm. I mean, just because the army as an institution is flawed and damaging doesn’t mean everyone in it is a terrible person. To paint every single veteran with the same brush is reductive and to make light of the debilitating mental disorders many have just seems wrong. Like yes, fuck the military as an institution completely 100%, but blaming disabled ex-front-line infantry maybe isn’t the best direction for our anger, perhaps.
A lot of veterans are poor people who were intentionally targeted by scouting programs coming to their schools starting at age 13, and most of them are worse off coming back than they were to start with… let’s be courteous to folks with PTSD
Don’t be an ableist fuckface. Intentionally triggering someone is disgusting.
I thought people on this godforsaken website at least understood this one basic principal, but apparently not, so let me make it crystal clear:
IT IS NOT POSSIBLE TO BE SELECTIVELY PROGRESSIVE
You can hate Ann Coulter. But if you suggest that she deserves to be raped, you are a misogynist.
You can hate Woody Allen. But if you say he’s part of a Jewish conspiracy or joke about putting him in an oven, you are an antisemite.
You can hate Michael Vick. But you call for him to be lynched or call him the N-word, you are an anti-black racist.
You can hate Caitlyn Jenner. But if you misgender her, or make comments about her genitalia, you are a transphobe.
And you can hate the military. But if you deliberately try to trigger veterans with PTSD, you are an ableist piece of shit.
You do no get to pick and choose which people to treat fairly when it comes to acknowledging and combatting prejudice.
Not liking a person is not a free pass to disregard anti-prejudicial words and actions. Either you respect marginalized peoples as a whole (even if you don’t like an individual), or you don’t respect them at all. There is no middle ground.
If anyone really like, agrees with harassing veterans with PTSD or anything similar, unfollow me right the fuck now. I don’t want you following me.
You don’t have to like the military, it’s massively fucked up but y'all needs understand that most people in the military are victims of propaganda and are usually poor or part of a minority who are taken advantage of in order to join.
