Take This Job And...,7

What are the alternatives to working for a living?  Besides being independently wealthy.  Or going on welfare.  There appears to be nothing.  We sell our time, energy, sweat, inspiration, and sometimes our mental and physical health in order to keep a roof over our heads, feed ourselves, support our families, clothe our bodies, and partake in the many fleeting pleasures of life.

From our teenage years till our retirement some forty or fifty years later we are going to be dedicating on average one third of our lives to our work.  Nobody is going to give a damn whether we like our jobs or not.  It is called work for a reason.

There are other things at play: the sense of contributing to the common good, the challenge of learning and using our skills and knowledge, the camaraderie of working with others, if you and the work happen to be a good fit.

There is not enough time here to go into the history of work in a post industrial, post tech society governed by rapacious global capitalism.  Suffice it to say that it is becoming increasingly more difficult to earn your living bread only by the sweat of your brow.  Because of market demands and the ever shifting economy and the legendary greed of the One Percent it is getting harder and harder to feed, clothe and house ourselves and our loved ones through our efforts at work.  The cost of living, especially of housing is skyrocketing while our wages and salaries remain stagnant.

It would seem then that a guaranteed minimum income for all should be the way of the future if we don't want to see our society eroded and destroyed by the kind of extreme and large scale poverty that is likely to result if things remain unchecked.

The wealthy minority will have to continue coughing up the tax dollars in order to provide for our sorry asses as we all become equally paralyzed by poverty in this glorious New Age where the vast majority of wealth becomes concentrated in the soft greedy hands of the obscenely wealthy few.  Good luck getting them to cough.

We need to work against this.  And we need a vision for our future.  Now.