WiseBabe

Wisebabe


 Sunday, October 19, 2003

INTERCONNECTIVITY

My dad used to say "everything is interconnected." It's a fun way of going about your day, trying to figure out how the dog playing with the squeaky toy is related to the three workers' strikes - food, transportation, and sheriff's department - in LA. Or how the dishes in your sink being clean or dirty could affect the vote on Iraq. So let's try.

The Dog and the Squeaky Toy: Blanche, my dog, pounces ferociously on a stuffed ball with a squeaker inside, then chomps it repeatedly while shaking her head furiously. After a minute or two of shaking and squeaking, she tosses it aside and pounces again. For all that it's cute (or annoying if you are sensitive to noise), the squeak represents what would be in the wild some bunny or mouse she was killing. Ah! the joys of being a predator, even if it's pretend.

Now some prey is helpless, like a mouse. And some, like your wildebeast in Africa, is not helpless so long as it is in a herd. If your lion attacked the whole herd, the alpha male members along with a mother or two protecting her child will kill the lion.

Say the predator is Management and the herd is The Workers and if they can keep things in ecological balance, both of sides thrive. But a little drought or economic downturn, and the imbalance might not stop until there's mass starvation on one side or the other - worldwide depression or massive walkouts and strikes.

So these three strikes in LA mean something is out of whack in the ecological balance of management and worker. The employers are all saying they can't afford the rising cost of health insurance which they, not the workers negotiate, and that workers will have to shoulder a bigger share of the financial burden. But I say look at the balance sheets.

The wealthy in America are getting richer every day, even with all the financial fiascos of the last few years. The wealth of the wealthy is rising and the herd of workers is getting irked that the lions want to come right in the middle and devour the heart of the herd instead of culling the weak. This is not going down so good with the workers, and hence strikes all over the place. All the talk about rising health costs is a blind for the real battle of predator and prey.

Ipso Factitious - Squeaky Toy > Predator/Prey > Strikes

Okay, so I got from the squeaky toy to the strikes and I 'm pooped. You're going to have to get from the dishes to the Iraq vote yourself. Though I am open to suggestions to explain the connection of other seemingly unrelated phenomena.
10:07:55 AM    comment []   Wisebabe Website