Posts Tagged “yardstick”

It is around five o’clock in the morning and a few creatures yet stir. The cat stalks its meal with its tail twitching, a nocturnal insect skitters over the paved flooring, the ember lights of a refuse-collection truck flickering on its nightly haunt of the Paceville entertainment district. Round the corner a waitress wearily stacks table, lacking the spring in her step that she had exhibited earlier near the start of her shift. The waves gently lap up upon the beach, each one draining away between the grains of sand in anticipation of the wave to follow, oblivious to the grudged rise of the working man and woman in preparation for another day of toil for their employers’ joy.

Time creeps onwards and a solar orb peaks over the horizon. The poorly roads grow congested with sheep and hogs on wheels, the cat narrowly misses it’s demise, the insect scurries down a dark crack and a few more loads of refuse are being dumped kilometres away. The waitress steps out of the shower and lays her weary head upon her pillow. The waves pick up and crash upon the shore with more force as grains of sand dance upon their crests.

Stuffed peacocks strut their stuff, hold their heads high and squawk in between fits and starts of preening themselves in self-gratification. They screw their expression into one of disgust as they watch men in reflective yellow jackets dragging a large bin and a broom along the road before returning to their self-professed hobby of sticking their noses of questionable worth into the affairs of those who earn their living through a means other than the peddling of misery.

By our own yardstick we are living in modern times. We would like to believe that the days when social class was accentuated are long gone and yet it does persist. There is no harm in the privileged taking pleasure in his or her good fortune but harm does come of those who would partake of the relative misfortune or misery of others for the purpose of their own self-idolization.

Is the individual occupied within the service-orientated industries truly deserving of the contemptuous treatment that they sometimes have to endure at the hands of their respective employers and their clients? Are they deserving of the ever more constrictive economic and social contractions that the employing classes would impose, given half the chance? After all, many who do work would also know that an employer is far more interested in expanding upon the fixed assets of any going concern than ensuring that their labour force is well-catered for. No, the worker, it seems, is fit only for the adequate, the minimum or as close to it as one can get away with.

Is the economic identity of an individual deterministic to a degree such that the fabric of society itself participates in a social variant of the food-chain, encouraging the dog-eat-dog world, as the saying goes?

In no way do I suggest that all individuals who serve are abused within the parameters of the law, and neither do all employers partake of the chalice of their workers’ blood, but it is a plausible guess that many of each category do. Such is a sad consequence of the structures of affluence and power that presently exist, with the welfare state as collective pacifier for the purpose of retaining control of the classes of quiet desperation.