I put birdseed out for the birds because it snowed, and as I was walking down the road enjoying the forced solitude of snow day shutting everybody down to more my speed, I was watching the birds bounce around, looking for scraps, and thinking to myself how they don't have any essential workers. They just forage for life. There are no essential workers in the wild. What a strange thing to be human, where we've somehow conquered our own susceptibility to the natural order, so that we can help humans survive. Originally this would've meant the weak or vulnerable or marginalized, keeping them alive despite the fact in the wild they would've died. Somewhere along the way we factored in economics, and rather than the weak or vulnerable or marginalized not having to ensure their own survival, it turned into the hoarding of abstract wealth, and the wealthy not having to do shit to survive, because they just dole out little pieces of their hoarded abstract wealth for others to do it for them. And it got so unbalanced that now we have hoarding to an extreme level, to where the hoarders of abstract wealth feel its justified for the weak or vulnerable or marginalized to just fucking die rather than spread survival mechanisms and safety nets against death and disease around to all humans. Thus, grocery store workers got considered "essential" because without them, the logistics of food distribution, which is already hugely wasteful, would've fallen apart even further. And it's not that people would've starved, because people are already starving, even though literal tons of food is tossed in the dumpster every day, because people didn't buy it or it was perishing and the stores don't want to risk the litigation of lawsuits if somebody gets sick. But those with the abstraction of wealth hoarded to a high enough degree wouldn't have been able to get their groceries still, without the essential workers. Same with restaurants. Nobody needs to eat in a fucking restaurant during a global pandemic. But they're open, and people are sitting at tables, enjoying their expensive meals, wait staff be damned. "What an absolutely fucked system of existence," I thunk to myself as I walked along in the snow, watching the birds. A pileated woodpecker flew out in front of me at one point, very beautifully, and that reminded me I had like a third of a bag of birdseed in the closet in the laundry room, so when I got home I scattered it. I don't have hoarded abstract wealth, but I had some birdseed, so I threw it out there in the snow, and spent most of the afternoon watching the cardinals and others, but most notably those big fat red cardinals, eating it.
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