To Live And Die At Mickey D's (Truth Stranger Than Fiction)

I came across this article today from The Atlantic, easily one of the funniest and saddest commentaries I've seen in a long while. "Disconnect" is the word I use to describe this century. Our words, our actions, our belief systems are continually diverging from reality. And it's getting to the point where unreality is the norm and reality itself some sort of subversion of our Great And Noble Ways. So if you need to live in the bubble world, read no further.

Well, this is both embarrassing and deeply telling.

In what appears to have been a gesture of goodwill gone haywire, McDonald's recently teamed up with Visa to create a financial planning site for its low-pay workforce. Unfortunately, whoever wrote the thing seems to have been literally incapable of imagining of how a fast food employee could survive on a minimum wage income. As ThinkProgress and other outlets have reported, the site includes a sample budget that, among other laughable assumptions, presumes that workers will have a second job.

Ah, if only we could put every conservative in the country on this budget! Work two jobs, have no life, no money, no way to get ahead and no way out. And then get to listen to a bunch of sanctimonious bastards casually debate on TV the horrors of raising the minimum wage as their stone hearts slip back into the limousine afterwards. It is said you do not know a man until you've lived under his thumb. All I've got say is America reveals her true character every day in her treatment of the working poor. Fuck you and your charity donation stairways to heaven.

But this is the fantasy world of the unreal at work here. A fantasy world so fantastic one need not even budget for gas and groceries! Perhaps with a bank involved there was too much underlying guilt to mention those two commodities. After all, unchecked bank speculation has inflated the price of oil which in turn inflates the price of food, siphoning hundreds of billions of dollars from those who need it most. (And yes, everyone from your President on down knows this.) So rather than lead a trail to their own misdeeds, our friends from VISA live the good life by simply removing any unpleasant facts. Thanks, guys! Problems solved!

To even attempt this endeavor shows the massive disconnect that wedges us further and further apart. Live long enough in the bubble and you can pretty much convince yourself of anything. "Poor people aren't like me. They don't need money like I do. They can always just work hard and get ahead if they want to!" So convinced was someone of this it even became a moral crusade to show the fabulous future available to minimum wage workers. What's worse, that's about par for the course nowadays for what passes as a "moral crusade".



The present is bleak and the future bleaker. America's love affair with greed won't end until it finally destroys her. Our "solution" is to make the poor and working poor invisible, twist the truth until the blame falls on the victims ("We don't need no stinkin' food stamps programs!") and cling to denial to the bitter end. But the unbreakable rock in all this upon which we slowly dissolve - the stone the builders reject - is the fact we do not have to live this way. We claim we do, we say there's no other way, but that is the lie that poisons the body whole. There is a way and it's our choice not to live.