Take a Break and Read a Fucking Poem: "What Work Is" by Philip Levine
by • Tuesday at 6:00 pm
With upwards of 30 million Americans unemployed, some economists are laying out bleak predictions about how many jobs will return and what will be left of them.
"It took us ten years—between 2009 and 2019—to create 22 million jobs. And we’ve lost 30 million jobs in two months," says NYU economics professor Nouriel Roubini in an interview with New York Magazine. "When they start slowly rehiring some of them (not all of them), those workers are going to get part-time jobs, without benefits, without high wages. That’s the only way for the corporates to survive. Because they’re so highly leveraged today, they’re going to need to cut costs, and the first cost you cut is labor," he added.
Meanwhile, insane MAGA hats and small businesses owners who are understandably concerned about their survival due to a lack of adequate assistance from the federal government are calling for the Governor to prematurely lift lockdown orders. But, for the umpteeth time, who is going to patronize these newly open shops? Nobody who doesn't want to spread a deadly disease, which is still ranging across the country.
The hard but obvious answer here is we all need to stay home and demand that our representatives pay us for doing so, but we'd all have to demand that. The reason why Trumpian Republicans won't is because they don't know what work is in the sense that former U.S. Poet Laureate Philip Levine means it in "What Work Is." You can find the poem in his book, which is also called What Work Is, available at local bookstores.
A few notes:
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