We Are Main Street

A Rejoinder.

We are Main Street. It's not our job to make money but to support our households. Whether it's a nursing, firefighting, factory work, or some hypothetical piece of the fake American Dream, it doesn't matter. We would harvest tomatoes if it was profitable and if the current wave of xenophobia and unemployment continues, some of us may have to. I didn't hear Wall Street complaining when the unemployment rate was roaring to 10% and everyone's 401(k) was trashed by Enron. Just like fucking the neighbor's pooch, it’s not a problem until you get caught. I've never heard of anyone going to Alcoholics Anonymous because they were the life of the party.

Well now, you and Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs and WorldCom and Enron and Magnatar and others have turned the market into crap, & even though it has yet to come back somewhat for Main Street, the corporate raiders and the stockbrokers are still looking beyond themselves for a scapegoat. God knows there has to be one for everything. Well, here we are, the American worker.

Go ahead and continue to take us down by bundling our retirement funds, our life insurance policies, our mortgages, but you're only going to hurt yourselves. What's going to happen when we can't find jobs on Main Street anymore? Guess what: We're going to take your million dollar condos and fuck your wives, high-priced hookers and your pooches.

We, especially those of us with two jobs, get up at 5am & work till 10pm or later. We're used to not sitting on our fat asses all day thinking up new and creative ways to rearend the American worker or get to pee when we have a customer. We don't take an hour or more for a lunch break at the Four Seasons. We demand a union because of capitalistic sociopaths like you. And we certainly don't retire at 50 with a pension, whatever that is. We eat what we can when we can, and when the only thing left to eat is cat food, we'll remember that. We'll remember you.

For years teachers and other unionized labor have had us fooled. We were too busy working ourselves to death for less and less to notice. But the American Dream is a sweat-drenched nightmare straight out of Elm Street because of you. Do you really think that we are incapable of learning how to fuck over the old and destitute? We, too, could go to business college and take your cushy jobs with stock options and 4 months off a year and whine just like you that you were still underpaid for selling out the youth of America.

But we think there are things better worth pursuing like building the American family and maintaining Main Street, valiantly trying to keep alive the American work ethic and pump the American Dream that you've discredited with an ambu bag in a vain attempt to keep it alive. Say goodbye to your stock options, perks and double lattes. I'll be hitting grounders to my kid for free each summer just before the revolution, thank you very much. Remember the French Revolution that your junior high Social Studies teacher droned on about while you were dreaming of how you could sodomize the American worker with impunity and even the support of our government? Let that be your guide.

So now that most of us are going to be making minimum wage without upside in this non-producing nation of shopkeepers you've helped create, Joe Main Street is going to have his revenge. Because people with nothing left to lose are the most dangerous. You think you have us outsmarted? Wrong!

Guess what: we can't buy the new 80k car, or even eat out at Subway, let alone leaving the 35 percent tip at business dinners paid for with expense accounts paid for with bailout money paid for by our tax dollars. But, we Main Street say, no more free rides on our backs. No more bailouts, no more complete lack of accountability. We can landscape our own back yards, wash our cars with a garden hose in our driveways, thank you very much. Our money was your money. Our future was your shortterm, short-sighted gain. You gambled and spent it. And when Main Street dries up, so will you.

The difference is, you lived off of us like the gabardine-swaddled parasites that you are and you're right. We rejoiced in it. Because starting with the Reagan Years, we were also fooled into thinking that Wall Street's health was synonymous with Main Street's health.

The Reagan, Bush I and Bush II administrations and the Republican National Committee might get their way and knock us off the bottom of the pyramid and the United States into a scorched, polluted, over-drilled wasteland. But it's really going to hurt like hell for you when our sore and bleeding asses land directly on the Main Streets of America and you'll have nothing left to squeeze.

You are dinosaurs. You were too smart and vicious for your own good, too complacent, thinking you were too big to fail, that the fruit would always be plentiful and low-hanging, that the prey would darken the plains and remain plump. But you will not survive. The question is, now that Reagan, the Bushes & their administration have made Joe Main Street your dwindling food supply, what will you do when we're all gone? Or when we descend on Wall Street like a meteor?