Indentured servitude for the poor

 Trump administration Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins has proposed tapping into the "34 million able bodied Americans" on Medicaid to fill out the labor pool of agricultural workers drained by the mass deportation program masterminded by White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. This is forced labor. While it's a nice reality check on anyone in the working poor who likes to bitch about immigrants receiving public benefits, it also exploits a cycle of poverty in underpaid labor, largely for the benefit of corporate agriculture.

Tying health care financing to employment is already discriminatory. Tying it to specific employment further divides the workforce into haves and have-nots, as some get better "benefits" than others. Don't like your insurance plan? "Get a better job," say the cheerleaders for the free market, as if you could just skip merrily over to that more generous employer who surely exists somewhere.

Medicaid is not a cushy free ride. Neither is Medicare. Big gaps are left solely for the benefit of private insurance companies and skinflint tax-haters who think that depriving fellow citizens of essential services and gouging them for the supplemental coverage expresses some virtue in social Darwinism and the glorious profit motive. In their idealized vision, the magnificent labor herd runs, harried by wolves and cheetahs and lions that pick off the weak while strengthening the survivors. Some of us are obviously nearer the top of the food chain than others.

Moves by the MAGA government to consolidate power should not surprise anyone, but they should never elicit a yawn, either. The freedom and future of anyone alive today faces serious threats from the unholy alliance of the immensely wealthy, authoritarian religion, and tireless disinformation aimed at voters too busy pulling together a living to do a lot of comparative research about the news selected for their direction.

As for the conscripted workforce of low-income Americans, we're still talking about public money spent only to address part of a problem that could be solved by a more organized program of national service.

When we got rid of the military draft -- which was a very good decision -- we took away a shared rite of passage endured by young men for decades. The volunteer military functions much better than one filled with unenthusiastic conscripts. But it removes that direct connection to the nuts and bolts of citizen government and the responsibilities of maintaining the Land of the Free. I have thought for years that a broader based national service requirement, providing subsidized labor to a wide array of necessary functions like agriculture would create a sense of greater ownership of the general welfare of the nation. Programs like Americorps and the Peace Corps (and others) have functioned relatively invisibly to most of us. If they had the same level of public image that the military enjoys, and were coordinated into an admired and valued complete package of public services, we would create another whole category of veterans, hopefully less exposed to traumatic violence. As a species, we should be working toward phasing out the traumatic violence.

Such dreams will have to wait until we are no longer held under the rule of a regime that values traumatic violence and the threat of incarceration as tools to enforce order. Welcome to the Land of the Free and Obedient.

Easter thoughts

 I got an email from my local hardware store the other day, informing me that they would be closed this Sunday for Easter. The funny thought struck me then that the whole holiday is based on the idea that Jesus got up and went back to work that morning after a pretty rough weekend. Now get back in there and sell me some grass seed and deck stain!

Christian societies have had a conflicted relationship with the sabbath for a long time, especially in the United States, a country founded on commerce even before it was a country. Each colony was a profit-seeking venture. Communities of conscience just provided the recruits willing to undertake the danger and hardship of the perilous ocean voyage and carving out a foothold, for the sake of a place where they could have a dominant role in governance. Religious freedom indeed. But your backers expect more than thoughts and prayers.

I've been out of the church scene for decades, but the logic of Jesus as I understood it then was that we would all do better if we looked out for each other rather than doing the work of tyrants or aspiring in even a small way to be one. This does lead to a world without concentrated wealth, but also without poverty.

At its most extreme, sabbath observance restricts virtually everything that we've come to associate with weekends. Work, play, travel, commerce, toil of nearly any kind must halt. That would include your Easter egg hunt, and a whole lot of the food preparation for Easter dinner. You'd have to rely on the labor of unbelievers, exploiting that they are damned by their unbelief. "Sucks to be you! But this lamb is cooked to perfection!"

Fortunately, we in America have embraced Sabbath Lite. By the words of the Constitution, you are free to express whatever faith you have in whatever way suits you. Just once in a while will you run into an interruption of the seven-day retail and recreation week. The term "business day" refers to specific types of business. You face little stigma for doing whatever you want on weekends, because those days are your allotted little share of your precious life, ceded back to you by the lords of the economy.

Sabbath breaking feeds the economy. And it erodes righteousness no more than sitting on your hands for a day would have done. You get the same choices that you would have on any other day about how to treat the people you deal with.

A scheduled sabbath gathering does create an opportunity for regular accountability to the community. Tying it to your specific religion limits that community, however, and might weaken the bonds overall to the larger secular community that provides the real engine of your economy and the legal framework that -- theoretically -- protects you.

"Might" weaken. Look at how the church is pitted against itself right now, between the "open and accepting" congregations and the Christian nationalist theocrats. Quick now: how many protestant denominations can you name in 30 seconds? And that's long after the split between eastern and western Catholicism. Christians have been arguing about the true nature and word of their headliner since about a week after he disappeared from every place in the mortal world except for the occasional miraculous piece of toast, or scam Shroud.

My own family embraced an easygoing philosophy toward other faiths: "One God, many names." It's an easy out if you want to go to a certain church but don't want to get sucked into a holy war. Other faiths of all sorts have their own adherents to the idea that we can all tie our values to a superior or supreme entity if that helps, praying in a familiar language. This attitude drives the fundamentalists cross-eyed with rage.

"One true faith! One true faith! One true faith!" There can be only one. The all-powerful deity needs propitiating, dammit. Now get in here and propitiate exactly as we taught you.

Hard core attitudes like that grow naturally from the exclusionary nature of source texts. If you saturate yourself with one brand of righteousness, it can't help but repel the concept that someone else might be okay too. Maybe you don't make direct war on them, but you know that you won't be seeing them in the Great Beyond. Go a little deeper and you can't associate with them at all. A little deeper yet and you can't even countenance their existence.

I can't tell you how to interpret Easter for yourself. Not even going to try. In most ways it is a day like any other. There is war, sickness, atrocity, suffering, privation, and injustice all unremedied. Nearly every problem is created by humans devaluing other humans. The will to stop it can never come from outside. It's a personal choice.

Deus f*ckin' Vult

 Insecure man and evangelical preacher Joel Webbon recently tweeted (X-ed?) that "Young men are waking up. Women will learn to have a quiet and gentle spirit, or they will learn to be alone." And then he caps it off with a favorite incantation of Christian Nationalists, "Deus Vult."

Our hard-drinking, unqualified Secretary of Defense has the same phrase tattooed on his arm.

Nothing classes up your gang of misogynist punks like a punchy slogan in Latin. It sounds really tough. You can sort of puke up that word "vult." Spit it in some liberal's face. "Uh oh! Take cover! They got Latin!"

It's just another way of saying, "inshallah." Or maybe, "mashallah." Crusader versus Muslim, more god-on-god violence in a clash between religions of peace.

The fundamentalists on either side of that pairing, and numerous other religions, are notoriously incapable of handling free women making their own choices, living as fully adult citizens.

I have the impression that a lot of women are quite willing to choose the "alone" option in the face of even less coercive philosophies than fundamentalist Christianity. And who can blame them?

Young men who follow the teachings of weak men are not waking up to anything. They're just surrendering to the natural insecurity common to all young men. The saying that "Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them" is based on very real observations over generations.

Men are not just performing for women. They are performing more for other men than for women. We're talking about cis hetero men now. That's all that the evangelical crowd will admit to being, and is the basis for their public judgment of the behavior of others. Manliness is expressed through power and control.

Just as slave owners attempted to convince the enslaved that they belonged in their inferior status, so too does sexism attempt to convince women to give up and let the man decide. As a competitive strategy, it makes sense. Why compete against a large field for whatever status you crave when you can persuade a bunch of them to forfeit without even trying?

Women have options. The religious right hates that, and is doing everything it can to eliminate those options.

I can understand why a woman would want to forgo the option of independence. Adulthood is scary. Women have had the shelter of a dependent relationship without the social stigma that would attach to a fearful young man who didn't want to face life as the master of his own destiny. But apparently some women felt enough shame and insecurity about that to oppose feminism for as long as there has been feminism. The stay-at-home wives and mothers want their role to be unchallenged. Don't make them look bad by achieving things. They have a strong ally in the religious right.

The problem with good old fashioned subjugation of women is that not every woman is going to find a lord and protector. What happens to the spare women that no one has wanted? If there is only one measure of womanhood, and that is marriage, the unclaimed brides can all go do what? Drown themselves?

Monotheism breeds simple minds. Atheists will go one step further and say that theism breeds simple minds. There's something to that, but we are so many generations away from giving up the belief in things unseen that we have to figure out how to get along in the meantime. Don't let the religious folks get too riled up into an apocalyptic frenzy. Don't let them make the laws. We can't stop them from talking shit to vulnerable young people, but we can prevent them from enacting drastic official legal penalties for behavior that doesn't adhere to their scriptures.

We have a problem with superstition in this country. People who do not attend an evangelical church, or maybe any church, continue to be swayed by moralistic-sounding arguments from authoritarian religious figures. It's Pascal's stupid wager, made by people who don't even know what that is. They enact it because they're not interested in a life ruled by religion but they're not sure enough that they can disregard it to shore up the wall between church and state.

At the risk of sounding like a libertarian here, we have to get back to celebrating the increasing freedom of individuals. We cannot extend unlimited liberty to groups who only feel fulfilled by taking away the liberty of others. Individual freedom does not transfer to organizations and associations that those individuals may join.

In defense of government, no one can have completely unlimited liberty. Participation in a civilized country has to include some firm elements of a social contract. We debate these constantly, as we should. But we can't let a mania for liberty lead to chaos and destruction any more than we let a mania for authoritarianism do it. Government has a role to protect and serve. Citizens have a role to guide those decisions. Not every government function constitutes oppression, but oppression is constantly trying to take over government functions. It's making a damn good try right now.