There is something you can do

When I commute into the city, I drive the casual carpool. I pick up riders at the Park and Ride in the morning, and on Beal Street in the afternoon. On the return trip I use the carpool on ramp, and it is one of those ramps with two lanes that merge into one. It also has three lanes feeding into two at the beginning of the ramp. So those of us coming from the Beal Street pickup point have to merge twice.

Every now and then some asshole in the lane to my right will tailgate the car in front of him, making the merge impossible. They refuse to let a car merge in front of them. Yes, this is rude behavior, and I try to never reward rude behavior, but in these circumstances there is nothing I can do. The key word of the phrase is 'I', there is nothing that I can do. That does not mean there is nothing to be done.

As we were approaching the entrance to the freeway, I noticed it happening again. Not to me this time, but to the car to my left. The car following me was right on my ass, doing everything they could to prevent the car in the other lane from merging. So I did something about it.

Although the white line was gone, the lane was still wide enough for two cars. I moved to the right, as far as I could. I slowed down (hard to slow down much more, it was stop and go already). I did that until the car on my left realized I was making space for them, and they pulled up beside me.

They were not even with me, they were about a third of a way from parallel. It was enough. I slipped in front of them and they followed me onto the freeway. There was nothing that they could have done about it, but there was something I could. So I did.

You could too.

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Brief thoughts on SNAP

There are a lot of people who work full time, but qualify for food stamps. That, all by itself, is a damning indictment of their employers, and our society at large. And there are others (Walmart comes to mind) who intentionally hire multiple part time employees to fill a single full time position, in order to avoid having to treat those employees as human beings.

So the business model is to pay wages that nobody can live on, and let the taxpayer pick up the tab for the difference. And we do, with food stamps, WICK, section 8 housing, and the rest of the taxpayer funded safety net.

And the right (particularly those who suck their livings off the public tit) has be demonizing these people as somehow less moral, less deserving, less human, than the rest of us, because their employer is an asshole. To some degree this works, a lot of people buy into the 'welfare queen' fiction. But too many still notice that is the employer who denies people a living wage who is really at fault.

Of course the moral solution is to raise the minimum wage, and to enforce that labor laws for businesses like Walmart, so that the employees are actually able to organize without retaliation and intimidation. The right of course would never buy into that, because their constituency does not include people who do actual work.

But fear not, they do have a solution! Kick people off SNAP! Sure their children will be even more malnourished than they are now, but the workers will not be living on the public safety net. No more evil employers!

Don't you wish you had thought of this?

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