the little guy (not mateo)

Every once in a while I start to chuckle at exactly the wrong thing. Like the other day when two girls I know were expostulating really seriously and with great fanfare about how awful it was that women in the states didn't get paid maternity leave like women in Canada. I laughed because I thought they were joking. They weren't.

I laugh because globally and historically these expectations are somewhat ludicrous. I mean, c'mon! Not only do we get paid waaaaaaaaay more than the global average for hour hourly labor, but now we think we ought also get paid to NOT work? We think someone owes us money for nothing, because we're just such amazing people, such a gift to the workforce? How funny is THAT? How utterly richminded and lotteryistic.

Apparently, if you market the idea to people for long enough that they deserve something (like a break, or a luxury vehicle, or incredibly fashionable clothes) just for being them, they'll actually start to believe it. Don't get me wrong - I'm as anti -"corporation sucks profit and lifeblood out of the little guy" as the next chap, but SERIOUSLY, people, we are NOT the little guy. On WELFARE, we live better than the little guy.

The little guy lives somewhere else and will work in toxic, life-shortening conditions for pennies. The little guy is in China, a teenage boy burning piles of computers from America to extricate trace precious metals for resale. The little guy is in Indonesia, living under a violent, oppressive dictatorship for thirty years because some despot has the foresight to loudly oppose communism during the cold war (yay, america! let's hear it for propping up wicked men to keep those even more wickider russian satan-worshippers from running the planet). The little guy is the homeless guy in L.A. who has his plywood shack under an overpass torn down by transit authorities because it's a "liability risk".