Why your job sucks: Sub shop employees fired two days before Christmas.

[jtuck004]

57. Nothing easy about servitude either...but if one doesn't try to start walking away, it's

never gonna change.

I fully well understand, and no one should ever take it lightly. The chances for failing are certainly there, though perhaps mitigated with the right group of people that have the right training. The Cooperative Mondragon in Spain started under a dictator by a group that was waging a low-intensity shooting war against a person who personally signed death warrants for his enemies, the Basque who started Mondragon among them. They survived and thrived despite what was almost certainly far worse odds than almost any person, most likely with far better education and access to technology and information, faces in this country.

In this country suicides increased starting in 2010, now outnumbering those who die in car wrecks. The increase came about in part due to an increase in the 50-65 or so age range, a group that is seeing a new, bleak future in which the employment that provided them with a life has been replaced by despair as the government has worked with business to sell their jobs to the lowest bidders overseas for the past 20 years or so. Today the chances of winding up in in poverty or as a suicide, while a relative few gain unreasonable profits, are getting better all the time for tens of millions of people. Those rich few, aided by politicians we and our neighbors elected, only have what WE willingly and with our hands and blood give them of our lives. There are those, primarily people who are profiting from things as they are, suggesting that if we just work toward this or that it will get better. But those solutions nearly always entail leaving them sitting in a far better position that others - sleeping in the master's house, as it were.

Maybe we need to compare what our self-respect and freedom are worth to a 1500 square foot space in Chicago, and think more deeply about what we are willing to pay.

Steve Biko was an anti-apartheid activist murdered by South African police. He said "The most powerful weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed." Harriet Tubman, trying to free slaves before our Civil War remarked "I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more, if only they knew they were slaves".

I think the problem at hand isn't the advantage the master holds from ownership of the physical real estate - it is his, or her, ownership of our minds. Else perhaps we might see that our servitude is far more costly than what it might cost us to obtain any building in any city.