look at me blogging! my lack of blogging never due to lack of thought, that is for sure. it is just hard to write it down these days. but i can't sleep tonight, so here goes.
Tonight I saw the play Nickle and Dimed with some of my fabulous fellow MSW students. The book, by Barbara Ehrenreich, was required reading before the start of our program. Now, a mere 8 weeks away from graduation, it was good sit and hear the stories again. Maybe I will have to dig out my first paper about it, and see what my initial thoughts were. But for now, just wanted to get other thoughts out.
The production was creative, entertaining and thought provoking. Several times I cringed at Barbara's words and actions that often spilled out from her "working class" facade to reveal a well-educated liberal non-conformist, who is misunderstood, and at times disliked, by her co-workers due to her ideals and rants about how things should be; for her instinct to fight "the man" and bite the hand that is feeding all of them (albeit meagerly). And then I had to cringe again when I immediately realized that I am more like Barbara than the co-workers that my social worky side wants to side with. That even in fighting for the "have nots" or "least of these" it is so easy to isolate and demean people instead of just trying to be their friend.
Towards the end of the show, the manager character comes to the front of the stage for a brief monologue. He is defending the practices of a certain big box store who is notorious for making employees clock out and then continue working. He says it is not personal. The benefit of working for a mondo corporation is that the manager is not the bad guy. The corporation is just driven by the numbers. The numbers make the decisions. He then turns it to the consumer, for they, after all, are the ones making the decisions based on numbers. They are the ones who want lower prices. Ouch.
But oh so true. Everything has a cost, but we are often not the ones paying for it. We make choices with our dollars.
How do we even begin within such a broken system? My mind is going in a lot of different directions....but the short answer is probably to stop playing by the systems rules.
