Man With the Power


What man?
Man with the power.*

Tomorrow (Veterans’ Day) is the final day of the four-day nationwide strike against the vax mandates.

It will be hard to tell how widespread the walkouts are, because the media will not be covering them. We will have to wait for statistics about staff shortages and agency closures before making any educated guesses about the effectiveness of the actions.

Airline pilots have already made an impact, as have firemen in New York City. It’s hard to tell with the police, though, because the “Defund the Police” movement has already decimated police forces all across the country.


(Click to enlarge)

We’ve read about hospitals having to cut back ICU coverage etc., but will this week see any further staff shortages? How many additional doctors and nurses will fail to show up?

What about DMV clerks? Or telephone repairmen?

Ordinary people who work for a living have enormous power when they act collectively. Individual protests undertaken piecemeal usually have little effect — people lose their jobs; they get evicted; banks foreclose on their homes; sometimes they get arrested and fined. Such isolated actions generally don’t have much impact on the larger issues they’re directed against.

It’s a different matter, however, when hundreds of thousands of people undertake the same protest action at the same time. The last phrase is key: Joe Six-Pack morphs into the Man With the Power when there are thousands of others like him doing the same thing simultaneously.

If people who work for a living were to engage in this sort of civil disobedience en masse, it would have a negative impact on the lifestyle of the wealthy elites who have imposed the vax mandates.

What happens when the chauffeur doesn’t show up to drive the limo? Or the pilot to fly the Lear jet?

Who will cook that oh-so-rare filet mignon?

What will they do when no one collects the trash from outside their wrought-iron gates?

Who will make the beds and do the laundry when the housemaids don’t come in to work?

The complex infrastructure on which their fabulous wealth depends is dependent in its turn on millions of blue-collar workers, skilled technicians, and competent professionals who come to work every day to keep the system humming along.

The haughty millionaires who give the orders are vulnerable, whether they realize it or not.

And the despised peons they grind under the heels of their Guccis may not realize it, either.

Until tomorrow, that is, when none of them show up for work and everything grinds to a halt.

That’s when the Man With the Power comes into his own.

*   From The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer (1947) starring Cary Grant as Richard Nugent and Shirley Temple as Susan Turner

Hey, you remind me of a man.
What man?
Man with the power.
What power?
Power of hoodoo.
Hoodoo?
You do.
Do what?
Remind me of a man…

 

3 thoughts on “Man With the Power

  1. Several Denver schools going back to online this week due to unexpected staff shortages. Colorado Peak Politics, a right political news site, presents it as teachers wanting more pay to sit at home. Don’t think they even heard about this strike.

  2. Haughtiness on the top of the hierarchy can indeed cause vulnerability in a war; and not only due to dependency on infrastructure but also on INFORMATION. If you are on the top you are alone — and once people below you get angry with you, you will be isolated and lose sight of the situation, and from that moment you are fighting blind. This is a hystorical recipe for tyrants to fall and even for losing battles and wars. So let us hope “they” truly piss “us” off, thereby cutting their access to infrastructure and information.

Comments are closed.