Let’s say you’re a producer of goods. Now let’s say the production costs of goods go up, because of something like increased Fed interest rates or, say, reckless tariffs. The cost you charge for your goods goes up because Profit is God. But now all your employees have to pay more for their food and other goods, so they aren’t as happy with their wages. The buying power of their dollar has gone down. So now in order to retain employees, your labor costs go up. So the cost of goods goes up. Lather, rinse, repeat.
I have two. The first one I can’t even believe it happened because it feels like bad writing to contrive the perfect circumstances.
I was in a tiny local comedy thing and we did these Weekend Update-style reworkings of local news. Someone was working out a skit that involved a bear and asked if anybody had a bear suit they could borrow. Turns out, they were pretty sure someone else at the comedy theater, a guy named Juan, had one. Someone asked, “Would it fit me?”
I had to say it.
“Guys, Juan size fits all!”
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The other was waaaay back, watching The Matrix at the student center in college. It had been out for a while and everybody had already seen it, but getting to rewatch it for a couple bucks on a big screen was worth it even for a poor college student. It comes to the scene where Agent Smith has Morpheus chained up and is interrogating him, then he describes the way humans consume and spread and destroy everything around them. Smith says, “Do you know what else does that?”
I call out from the crowd…
I’m not the kind to talk in movies, but again, I had to say it.
I don’t want to get my hopes up, but there is a very real possibility that there’s a lot of cognitive dissonance building up in the base between what their parents and society taught them was being a decent fucking human being and all the stances they’ve had to rationalize in order to believe they’re right to have supported Trump. That tension makes them unhappy and makes them double down on the more immediate, more personal decisions again and again.
But once you give them an out, a way to justify a correction to say “well I was for him when he was just ‘telling it like it is’ but now that I found out he’s a pedophile, well now mama didn’t raise me to let a sin like that slide…”