As you may (or may not) already know, I began my official on-the-books working career at 15 years-old, which means I've been paying into our system since, with my taxes that were taken heavily from any meager paycheck I could ever hope to have, just so I could stave off starvation, sickness, and homelessness when times got rough (like the upcoming week), and they were always rough for me and my generation, because we don't use war for blood money. It's kinda unethical, you know? Living in a constant state of stress like the "paycheck-to-paycheck" lifestyle was specifically designed to keep me and my friends stressed out, and, hopefully, too sick to notice egregiously illegal behaviors like stealing and working the system behind our backs, to benefit anyone but the people who truly needed it.
With that in mind, I had very little expectations about any of the "social services" that were supposedly there to help me out whenever I needed it, you know, because I paid the heaviest tax shares in our free society as a hard-working single woman who paid all of her bills and expenses. My dad also liked to bark it out to me in a rough, red-faced laugh, whenever he felt embarrassed about his evasive financial maneuvers that were totally legal, because he had worked with legislators as a cable t.v. business owner to make sure that the laws benefited him and his money best. "Hey! Thanks for the 'bail-out' on my failed crops!", he'd brag aloud as a "gentlemen farmer" who didn't need the money, stretching out his hand in mock fellowship for me to shake, taking another big drink afterwards. You're welcome.
Not that I expected understanding from him, or any other rich white man. If he failed to humiliate me in front of his guests to keep me down, my cousins would gladly chip in. "Yeah...I don't think I could ever take Unemployment", said one fucking dick of a cousin to me over "the holidays". This, from a dip-shit who needed his dead father's money handed to him by his mommy so he could hide out in college for, like, ten years, and then do jack-shit for the rest of his family when they hit hard times. Yeah, go fuck yourself, kid. I changed your fucking diapers when you were a baby, and you've never done a g-ddamn thing for anyone besides yourself in this family. I didn't say it out of deference to my lovely grandmother's home, but I took a deep, steadying breath before I schooled him about how my benefits are my money taken out of each paycheck I'd ever paid into since childhood.
Uh, you didn't work throughout your entire school career that lasted for, like, twenty years or so, right? Oh, if I said that, then I would have been chastised for "ruining Christmas" for everyone, because my cousin had it so hard with his father's early death from alcohol and chain-smoking, that he must be allowed to be a completely selfish prick whenever his spoiled, lily-white ass feels like it, to make up for his present state of unreal being. Same with his uptight, upstate white bitch, because "they're scientists". Yeah, right, I've got one of those, too, ass-hat. Boy, does my mom know how to clean Petri dishes and hyper-vigilantly monitor the dishwasher? Like no other. We got nothing back from all of our finessed payouts from a system designed to bankrupt us the minute were stopped "working" at someone else's company.
And it didn't end with privatized humiliation. If we dared to take back a small share of our tax money like I did, the system would try to force me back into someone's office as quickly as possible. It was like welfare for working class people, except that I carried everyone involved. You know, just like I did at home without the handicapped people noticing small details like me. I wasn't worth the trouble, or so I've heard all of my life. I was "carefully selected" to be in a joke of an "entrepreneurial program" designed to flatter the ego of rich whites encountering their very first crisis in life, and it didn't end there. To continue this system of entitlement, my dad also had to do his part, by once again threatening me over the phone or via email, withholding money or using other serious ramifications like a tour in a loony bin (chauffeur-driven, of course), if I didn't find my own way fast.
Oh, okay...so, just like my everyday life, right? Well, yeah! It's always this aggressive indifference to protect one's own ass. It was so cowardly to me that it took my breath away still, and my dad had benefit of a Navy training with plush G.I. Bill money for his service to our country. Of course, the "seminar" was a complete sham. Both of the "mentors" were paid by the state for their participation in the program as rich white retirees, naturally. Gotta protect that income stream of revenue, know what I'm sayin'? As used as I've become to this obsessive ass-covering that marks the seriously disturbed individual in a high-performing workflow, it's never stopped shocking me. The complete condescension behind it by people with much less ability, that's what's always bothered me. It's so rankly obvious.
So, I sat through it and then had to talk my former "mentor" of a businessman father (not to me, but to those impoverished Mexicans and po' white trash of West Texas, y'all) about how it sucked—without him threatening to hurt me by withholding the paltry scraps he tosses my way like I was one of his cheap throwaway dogs that he likes to hurt or kill whenever people aren't watching—and in his barren empty plains, there's no one there to hear you scream. I reiterated my expertise in securing funds from many a rich white man who deliberately set himself up as a "creative patron", so as to better yank at the chains of oppression that binds talent to money, as a torture device for our simple acts of living, working, and excelling far beyond his expectation and your awareness. I survived, you see. I'm still alive, and that is rather inconvenient, isn't it?
I wouldn't like being reminded about my degradation and subsequent downfall, either. No one has the "Art of Empathy" perfected quite like me and my very small band of loyally caring illuminators, for if we didn't understand you in your human condition better than you, who would bind your egotistical books for you to use as a trophy at family parties, while my work "languishes" behind your falsely turned backs? We support and love you anyway, without your validation or evidence, because if we don't give more than you, then you all go down hard, don't you? No, don't answer me back. Your continued silence is all the proof I ever needed to show intentional negligence and deliberate impoverishment, but, oh, how the times have changed despite your artificial halts to progress? Yes, they have. Finally.
Schedule of Minimum Wage Increases
December 31, 2016
$11.00 per hour
December 31, 2017
$13.00 per hour
December 31, 2018
$15.00 per hour
December 31, 2019
$15.00 per hour
| http://www.labor.ny.gov/workerprotection/laborstandards/workprot/minwage.shtm |
