Sorry about the rambling. I dunno why I wrote so much, but I don’t want to consign it to the draft folder purgatory I only so recently purged.
Today, in the grocery store parking lot**, a truck transporting hogs had broken down.
I dunno if everyone knows what these trucks look like. They are double decker things, these slivery crates with the animals packed in tight. When I was little, before the road was four laned, the trucks would come right through the middle of the town, reeking of pig shit.
Actually, those trucks and those too tiny pig lots local farmers used to have had me assuming pigs naturally stunk. When my little Ryoga showed up I assumed I was going to just have to endure a terrible stench out by the pool. It turned out that if you actually give pigs enough space they don’t stink at all! Who knew!
Anyway, as the trucker worked on his engine the giant cage rattled as hogs moved about. You could see them, the side of a pig, an ear, just glimpses through the gaps. Every now and then a snout would stick out, sniffing at the air. Despite the fact there was the occasional unhappy squeal, the pigs probably didn’t know they are on their way to die, only they were packed in tight in a metal box, and now that they weren’t being jostled around they were baking in the sun and smelling the same horrible diesel exhaust that was choking me.
My god, Ryoga doesn’t know how lucky he was when he ran away and found me! That would have been his fate. He would have been butchered years ago.
Instead he has his cozy house surrounded by trees. He has a human that feeds him twice a day, gives him apples, shares her oranges with him, gives him newspapers to thrash to death, rubs his belly, and frets if he pulls a muscle or catches a cold.
I was buying him fresh wood chips, hog feed, and apples on this trip, while I watched his cousins becoming agitated in a truck that started rocking. I’d be petting and scratching at Ryoga, snuffling back at him face to face just a few hours later. And they would soon be dying.
Look, I get humans are omnivores. I am too. But I can’t stand the thought of eating bacon, ham, etc ever since Ryoga entered my life. It’s no different than how most people would never seriously entertain the idea of eating dogs or cats. I see those pigs, and I see my “little one”.
Ok, Ryoga isn’t exactly little anymore(my tusky buddy weighs much more than me), but he’ll always be “my little one”, the scrawny, battered, little piglet the size of a cat that took Mom and I by surprise late one October day. He’s special to me, but maybe some of those pigs on that truck are smart or silly or cute or playful too. It was just insane luck that he escaped and found me.
At Walmart two people held up signs begging for money, one someone that looked decidedly sickly who said they were disabled, the other a frail old woman, hunched over. Both looked sad, ashamed, and exhausted as they struggled at different ends of the parking lot to keep standing.
So very little separates me from them, as my body breaks and my bank account dwindles. My home is dilapidated, but it is a home. Many of the things my family left me a broken, but some work. I have a very meager allowance to survive on, but it has so far been enough to not quite starve. But how long before I have no livable house and not enough money to meet basic needs?
And it occurred to me that I was like Ryoga. We both got lucky. And loved.
He doesn’t appreciate it, of course, and has no concept of the precariousness of existence. If I die before him, he is probably doomed.
I was like that once too. Taking my family and the life they offered for granted, intellectually getting I was lucky, but emotionally incapable of truly predicting the future that lay ahead.
Like most animals I have a terrible problem of existing too much in the now, and almost paradoxically that has gotten worse now that the reality of my life has proven the folly of such a life. The trouble is, once I started falling there is no time or energy for planning or preparing when everything has become about surviving. How an I exist outside the now, when every moment yanks me back with a new crisis?
Today I watched pigs in a truck, on their way to slaughter, and people that life has crushed desperately hoping for a moment of anonymous kindness from people that would rather not make eye contact. And I feel all the luck I have, and all the fear of how it cam so easily slip away.
**Super stressful shopping trip. I was trying desperately to get the essentials on my list yet still save enough I could pay a certain bill due this month. The good news is I succeeded. The bad news is I may or may not be able to buy groceries for myself again this month! LOL (Don’t worry. The animals come first. )
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"but if you're pro-union, why are you anti-cop-union?" because cops are not laborers. what cops do is not labor. they are enforcers of the laws that oppress laborers and exist solely to protect capital. don't bother me with stupid questions.
🛑 STOP asking me to make the post rebloggable. i refuse to let a bunch of anticommunists, libertarian anarchists, neoliberal spooks, and other pro-cop fascists pass around their bad-faith additions on a post if i can help it (which i can, by disabling reblogs) while others of you are saying some really misguided, off-topic shit, and it’s pissing me off.
please get your facts straight before embarrassing yourselves on the internet. for fucking ONCE in your lives.
i am not “redefining labor” i SAID that cops are not LABORERS (EXPLOITED WORKERS) unionizing to receive better working conditions for the betterment of their fellow workers. they participate in collective bargaining with the express goal of subjugating and abusing the working class by protecting their fellow cops who harass, brutalize, stalk, rape, and kill the poor, homeless, working class, and other marginalized people. OTHER, ACTUAL LABOR UNIONS also use collective bargaining power to protect their members. if you argue otherwise, i’m sorry but you need to get serious and examine not only the truth about what a labor union is and does but why our purposes and missions and goals as unions are what they are. clarification aside, here, that wasn’t the fucking point of this post! the derailing and misunderstandings of what a LABOR UNION IS that occurred in the short time this post was rebloggable was too insane not to shut off reblogs!
COP unions, LIKE I SAID IN THE ORIGINAL/ABOVE POST, ARE UNIFIED IN DIAMETRIC OPPOSITION TO THE LIBERATION OF WORKERS, AS IN PEOPLE WHO DO LABOR (WHICH DOES NOT INCLUDE THE LITERAL ARMED PROTECTORS OF CAPITAL)
NO OTHER UNION BASHES, KILLS, OR ARRESTS STRIKING WORKERS LIKE COP (OR PRISON GUARD) UNIONS DO.
if you agree with the post so much that you NEED it on your blog or whatever, post a screenshot of the original post with this part cropped out and leave me the fuck alone! THANK YOUUU!!!!!!!
and to the wiseasses saying screenwriters and actors "aren't laborers, either," are you just fucking stupid actually? you think artistic labor isn’t labor? shut the fuck up.
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