“Find a Better Paying Job in the Private Sector”

So the U.S. got a pretty giant benefit after World War II. I mean, we got lots of benefits, but let’s just think about one for right now:

People with highly specialized knowledge, people that keep you safe, came here because we wanted them to. We invited them. We promised them that we were ‘the good guys.’

Those people with specialized knowledge filled up academia and the public sector and, yes, also some private companies, with all sorts of awesome scientific discoveries and technological advances. They also served as mentors and teachers to subsequent generations of scientists and technologists who have made this country a leader in those highly specialized fields for so many years.

Apparently Elon Musk sent a ‘separation email’ to some federal workers that said, “Go find a higher paying job in the private sector.” That was it, their notifications that they’d been fired.

Elon Musk and Donald Trump fail to realize a lot of things, but I can’t stop thinking about this one:

Many of those people already turned down much higher-paying opportunities in the private sector because they wanted to work for the public good.

Clearly Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s flawed brains lack the flexibility to conceive of the fact that people motivated by knowledge and public good and working in the public sector are not going to start for-profit businesses. But they certainly might go work for China or Germany or Canada or anywhere in Europe.

Unfortunately, Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s brains aren’t flexible enough to conceive of brains that (thank god) don’t work like their own. They can’t conceive of the fact that everyone isn’t motivated by money. And they don’t understand how the brains of people who aren’t motivated by money are key to the success of any society.

The types of brains that do the important scientific work that keeps us safe are not necessarily the types of brains that excel at (or wish they excelled at) business. These are clearly very different skill sets.

The inverse is so glaringly obvious when you look at Donald Trump, a man whose sole purpose in life seems to be to make money. Granted, his business acumen is certainly debatable, but despite his lack of actual success, business is where his interests lie. And quite clearly, his skills of logic, linear thinking, creative flexibility, and problem solving are lacking.

That’s okay. His brain is specialized. And you know what? It takes ALL kinds to make a successful society. I’m not knocking him for his lack of innate talents or skills in certain areas. We genuinely need people with his business drive and marketing savvy.

However, what we don’t need is any one single individual to have all of the power. I wouldn’t want a singularly-minded, highly-specialized weather analyst single-handedly running the country either.

As they say, it takes a village. We need highly-specialized weather analysts to keep us safe. We need virus researchers to keep us safe. We need environmental public health scientists to test our water. And we do actually need… business people.

But when you blindly tell highly specialized workers to simply, “Go find a better-paying job in the private sector,” you are not only being an ungrateful and condescending asshole and jeopardizing the safety of our country (and in some cases the whole world), but, as a business person, you’re also throwing away pretty sweet access to some really cheap labor.

Now people with different skills from mine are surely crunching the numbers on this, but even I can tell you that paying contract workers costs a shitload more than doing work internally. Even the shittiest of business people (me) knows that.

So Elon Musk is throwing away a whole lot of highly specialized cheap labor that he is going to end up having to hire again for three times as much.

If you fire someone who’s making $60,000 a year knowing that it would cost you $180,000 for six months to hire them back as contractors, that clearly makes no business sense.

But clearly that lack of business logic only matters if you operate under the assumption that Elon Musk and Donald Trump actually care about protecting regular Americans who aren’t rich enough to purchase things like expensive private health insurance or underground bunkers to save them from extreme weather. Clearly, they do not have the needs of regular Americans at heart or in mind, so my logic is already flawed.

So the two options are:

The people doing the firing have no business sense, or:

The people doing the firing have no interest in providing the services to the public at all (note: these are services that the public already voted to be funded, mind you), and thus they think that only people who can afford these services deserve to receive them… ie. rich m/billionaires like these two dipshits who are wreaking havoc on our society.

Yes, the first option is obviously somewhat the case (but I can almost forgive them for their logical mental deficiencies)… but the second option is even more frightening because it is gross and nefarious.

They clearly believe that people should (and should want to) make money off of telling people tornadoes are heading for their houses. They clearly believe only the rich should have access to doppler radar information. They clearly believe that people should have to pay to find out the projected path of a hurricane and that fire departments should only be available to people who subscribe to their services. And of course they clearly believe that only those who are lucky enough to afford it deserve to be protected from HIV or Ebola or tuberculosis.

This is not okay!

Fear. Sadness. Shame.

Let’s start with our feelings… because they’re really BIG right now.
I know that talking about our feelings isn’t a solution or a path forward, but let’s just start here with Daniel Tiger, and then we can move on to like, Solzhenitsyn or something.
The point is that it’s completely imperative that we start somewhere. NOW.
We are on the slippery slope toward authoritarianism. We are sliding very quickly. Yes, it is very hard to stop the sliding once it’s gotten going. And in order to stop it, we’re probably going to break some bones in the process. But that has to be way better than falling all the way off the cliff.
So right now, we’re all sitting around in our houses or at our desks or in our cars or walking down the street, looking at our phones, reading the news, being angry and hopeless and afraid and confused. The consensus seems to be that there are TOO MANY THINGS to be angry about. Protests aren’t being organized because nobody is sure which thing to protest.
But surely if ever there was a time to show up and express outrage, it is now.
If you look out your window and see a tornado heading toward your house, you run into the basement closet and drag a mattress over your head.
But what if you look out your window and you see FIVE tornadoes heading toward your house at the same time? You don’t sit there and say, “There are too many tornadoes! I’m just going to sit here and watch them kill me.”
No. You run to the basement closet and, if anything, you pile on MORE things to try to protect your head
The amount of action taken to save yourself is in direct relationship, I would say, to the number of tornadoes.
If you had seven mattresses available and enough strength and time, you put them on your head. You would do everything you could to keep those tornadoes from destroying your world.
Now, I understand that some people want their worlds to be blown up right now. Intellectually, they might have an inkling of a point. I get it. Some stuff really really sucks. But in reality, you just need to read some fucking history books and see what the options are when shit gets to this point: They’re not good.
Yes, we have a system that’s built for inaction. We have a system that needs to be fixed. You can disagree with so many things that this country has done, but for a good long while, we have been TRYING to be force for good in the world. George W. Freaking Bush saved, like, a zillion people from HIV, for god’s sake.
The question now is what do we do?
I’m just someone sitting at a coffee shop at 4:30am writing this because I keep waking up with this one phrase in my head: THIS IS NOT OKAY.
I’m not a leader. I don’t have any specialized knowledge or power or skills aside from typing stuff like this. But if we don’t have any leaders who are telling us what to say and how to say it, then we have to figure it out ourselves right now.
What we need right now is for regular people like us to stand up and say that what’s happening is not okay. This is not what we want. This is not who we want to be.
I woke this morning up thinking about the resistance during Nazi Germany:
Obviously you had the evil people who planned and carried out the atrocities, and obviously you had the innocent humans who were killed by the evil people.
It’s easy to boil it down to just that: the evil people and the innocent people they slaughtered.
But what about the people like who were horrified and disgusted and scared and ashamed, but were somehow fortunate enough to avoid being slaughtered?
They existed and were certainly having the types of feelings we are having right now. They, too, surely experienced a slippery slope (yes, yes, I know our crazy leader isn’t at the point of senselessly slaughtering people, but who the f knows where things are heading? He just treated a brave head of state like a child and his shame knows no bounds).
Yes, of course there was a resistance. It was real and the people were working so hard, but essentially when we think about the people in that period, what we’re really thinking is, “How could they have let it happen?”
Most of what those people were doing and thinking and writing and making and caring about was essentially erased from history. Because who cares about the art a random non-Nazi German was making at that time right before the shit was going down? Was someone doing landscape paintings or writing love poetry? Was someone cooking amazing meals or tending a beautiful garden? Training for a marathon? The privilege of normalcy is erased when evil (temper tantrum-throwing) authoritarians are allowed to take control and ignore the rule of law.
It feels embarrassing to go about my daily life right now. I’m supposed to exercise and shower and, dear God, FLOSS my teeth when our entire system of government is being dismantled in willy-nilly non-fact-based fashion by billionaire bullies with no sense of empathy, decency, or logic. When humans are dying of HIV and Ebola and tuberculosis (and f-ing measles) because of the destruction of USAID, when Ukrainians are fighting for their lives and homes while our our president is berating their president. When people in the Congo are being wiped out. When Gazans are dehumanized and talked about like infestations to be cleared to make way for beach resorts… When extremely important specialized government workers who are trained to keep up SAFE are losing their jobs. When contracts are being reneged upon and this country is no longer seen as trustworthy. When the people who literally warn us about literal tornadoes are being fired!
YES, there is a lot of shit going on right now. YES, it is overwhelming.
The longer we allow Donald Trump and Elon Musk to dictate where our money is spent (and ignore the laws we voted for to tell them where that money is spent) and to ignore the rule of law and destroy our system and singularly sow the seeds of war, increase suffering, support other authoritarian regimes, and destroy the scaffolding of science that we’ve built over decades, the more our lives will, historically speaking, be forgotten. We will simply be reduced to those other people who were surely alive but just watching all the shit go down.
On the most personal level, if this is allowed to continue, YOU and your life’s work, whatever it may be, will be forgotten. Even though you are one of the ‘good guys’.
Because surely there were just as many outraged good guys in Nazi Germany as there are outraged good guys here in the United States.
We need to use our voices even though it feels very hard and hopeless right now.
This is a tipping point. Maybe it’s already tipped. But hopefully we still have time to run to the other side of the ship.
We’re waiting for someone to tell us where to go, how to help, what to do. We want someone to tell us one specific unified thing. We’re all sitting here feeling this way and waiting. We have to start. We have to be doing something NOW.
You have a phone, so you have a voice.
Send a simple text: THIS IS NOT OKAY.
Text people in your contacts. Text people in Canada and Ukraine. Text your relatives. Text your PTA. Write it on postcards to your representatives: THIS IS NOT OKAY.
Right now let’s just start with our voices and that one simple sentence over and over again to show the world we exist and that we’re trying and that we don’t support this. Show the world that we are here and we feel awful and we are decent, caring, logical humans. Show the world we are not people to be forgotten in history because we couldn’t stop the madness. We can’t lay down and do nothing.
No, sending a simple text is not an answer to a really complicated problem.
Yes, we need REAL solutions in a big way, and fast.
But we also need to feel less hopeless and less alone.
Every time you see those words you will know that you are not alone. You are among people who feel the way you do, and the fact that you exist is important.
So type it over and over again everywhere. Let’s start there.
THIS IS NOT OKAY.
#thisisnotokay