capitalism gone wrong Archives - Author K. Williams

We all do it to some degree. It manifests itself in a multitude of ways: I’ll schedule that for later after I complete this other task—and then you never get to it. A number of things come along and distract from the tasks at hand. Procrastination. In fact, I think I just spent the entire summer and fall blaming my blog and other book releases for not being able to do the research for my next book. After all, I did finish writing OP-GHO: Operation Ghost and I’m still working on marketing my scifi/fantasy series. OP-GHO won’t be out until 2018, at the earliest. The others will be out in the two years between then. And, they’re done.

I’m sort of at an impasse with how I’m gauging this procrastination: I just wrote a book, can I take a break before the next one? I have three years of publications coming, so there is no rush. Still, I could do the research, because I need to hammer out a number of things before I can get any further into the writing (I had started a few years back. At that time, I also talked myself out of continuing on it).

The impasse deepens here. In my experience, when I can’t move forward on a project, it’s because I’m missing important pieces to the story. Whether it is a bit of information or an experience I need to have, something is telling me to slow my roll. And, it is high time I took a wee break to rest up. In that reasoning, I take a seat or do something else, waiting to stumble upon the insight awaiting me.

No worries. I will write one of my projects before too long.

This same dance occurs in so many aspects of our lives. At work we’ll ignore one pile to peck away at another pile that isn’t as demanding, until the first pile gets so high we can no longer ignore it. Often, we find ourselves in a pickle with having a lot less time to do this work, which takes more concentration and care than our other tasks. And, thus we make mistakes and feel like we don’t have enough time. (Remember getting told by your elders that you should tackle the tough stuff first? Yeah, they know what they’re talking about).

Procrastination can cause us to have less time. After all, that is point: to put it off until the last minute. That said, there are legitimate instances where we do not have enough time and no amount of planning is going to make that change. Some people like to fill up their calendar with activities and tasks, which have nothing to do with putting off things they would rather not do.

Preference, also, isn’t always the driving force. It’s not necessarily that we dislike the tasks but it might take more effort on our part to complete it and our minds build that up to mountain-sized obstacles. For instance, reading a new book and/or writing a book review. Sure, we want to read that new book, but when–we’re helping with the kid’s school play, work has asked me to take over time, I have to volunteer at the local shelter, the house needs cleaning? Add on the additional burden of wanting/needing to write a review and it starts looking like the Grand Tetons in January. Yet, it’s not really that big of a deal. Anxiety has dug in.

Perhaps the real problem is that there are so many choices out there of things to do and things that need to be done that we’re overwhelmed. I know I feel overwhelmed with the number of things I have on my list. How I got through working full time, writing and going to graduate school—I am no longer certain how I managed. The amount of time in a day hasn’t changed. The only difference is that I now have different choices to make and I’m simply making the choice to do easier and time consuming things, like binge watching Netflix. I justify it as research in writing screenplays and other fiction. Keeping tabs on what is hot in current culture is very important to what I do as I plan out my work.

In the end, my policy is to not put things off. It always seems that the minute you do, things start piling high. If you attend tasks as soon as possible instead, then often that pile doesn’t climb high at all. Still, there are times when the floodgates seemed to be locked open and everything is coming at once. I guess that’s another reason to follow through in a timely manner, so such moments aren’t so overwhelming.

Thanks to one of my readers for the suggestion of topic! If you’d like to suggest a topic, leave me a comment or use the contact form.

Good luck with your to do list!

“It was a time of company towns, when all real estate, housing, doctors, and grocery stores were owned by the coal companies themselves, which led to the suppression of dissent as well as overinflated prices and an extreme dependence on the coal companies for everything that made life livable. In some of these, workers couldn’t even leave town, and armed guards made sure they didn’t. Also, if any miner or his family began to air grievances, they might find themselves evicted and run out of town.” – Brandon Weber, curator, shared on Upworthy

My travels have carried me as far as Ireland in the East and as far as Memphis in the West. I’ve met a lot of people and have still further to travel and more places to stop along the way ahead of me. But, in that time already spent, a constant degradation of the view of Unions has been seeping among those people I meet. Speaking on privilege, the subject often errs on the side of race and gender, but there is another seat to which the horse-racing-blinders apply: Economics. Race is gendered and economic, and all the probable combinations of that.

Unions are a relatively new construction, at least for the United States. I believe Rome had their congregations and strong arm tactics for the rights of workers being hired. That said, the United States is the first in line to try and shirk the necessity of such institutions. Why is beyond my ability to understand. I’m pro-labor and therefore pro-union. The two shall not be parted. The simple fact of the matter is, if you view your time and effort (labor) as a commodity up for sale, then you start to understand the dynamics of how this thing should work. Instead of viewing your time and effort (labor) as something you MUST do, must feel privileged to have a job, view them as items for sale.

Everyone says that time is money. Time is precious. Most certainly it is. You’ll never get a minute spent back. So all the time you spend commuting and working is gone. It’s lost. Do you realize that if you work 5 days a week, you have approximately 4-6 hours a night at home with family and friends to spend. The rest is spent on resting, your commute, preparing for the day and actually at the job. Resting, commute and preparation time is not time you really spend on yourself. We all require rest, but we cannot get anything done while we’re tranced out in the sack, and quite frankly, you might as well call it preparation time. The reason you sleep your forty winks, is so you’re rested for the next day, which you spend on someone else’s business. So goes the commute, some of the weekend (doing laundry, cleaning up, preparing meals ahead of time, etc.) A modicum of time is spent on your own needs, your business. That is supposed to be compensated by a salary or wage and benefits. When you earn subsistence level wages, that’s very hard to accept–depressing even.

And, yet, there are those who feel that we should feel honored to have a job–regardless of what that job is, what it pays, what it does to us.

The individuals who should be honored about the job you hold, are those who benefit from the labor you put forth. Having a job is a right, not a privilege, as our system works on a monetary exchange base. Calling it a privilege is probably the biggest slap in the face when you earn them how much in return for sitting there putting caps on tubes for a buck an hour? And, the company cries about billion dollar earnings not being enough, as the seat you were given pinches your ass cheeks and gives you sciatica and wondering where you’re going to get the money to buy school clothes for your child, or fix your car so you can get to work. That example hardly illustrates all the health problems workers get from their jobs, from emotional to physical injury. They give us benefits that barely deal with the issues: cover cost by copay, forced to take generics instead of the actual medicine needed, procedures refused for ‘we don’t cover that on your policy’. And your wage never makes up the difference in the maintenance of the machine that is you. There’s a reason they call that office Human Resources, where you talk to other machines about benefits and salary–you are a resource. Generally, you’re thought of as a renewable resource, but we’ll see how that goes as the environment in which we function continues to degrade. Much like other machines, our systems are pretty delicate and the things in our environment can gum up the works. One too many grains of sand in your gears and there’s no fixing what’s broke.

Now that you see you’re a machine who barters time and effort for salary and benefits, you might start to understand why it is necessary for all those machines to band together and negotiate the sale price of that time and effort and maintenance cost. For those who think that unions are pock mark on the butt of labor, they have really missed the lesson of history in this regard. Slavery may be illegal, but indentured servitude has come under another name: Capitalism. Without proper regulation, the human machines doing the work will be maintained at the same level as the other equipment in the factory: used up until they break and then replaced with newer models. Hated. Despised.

To learn the lesson of history, check out this video on Upworthy about a Mining Union to learn more about the history of Labor Unions…