Warning: if yesterday's essay bothered you, today's won't make you any happier. In fact, today's might make you want to throw stones (literally) at me. Read at your own risk.
Disco Inferno is a place I think about regularly. Imagine a place where all elected officials (and the unelected or self-appointed ones too) could be sent to suffer through endless reruns of "Saturday Night Fever", polyester disco suits, Donna Summer's pantingingly puerile lyrics, "Welcome Back, Kotter", and maybe with the Village People thrown in for added torture. Think of this as a Guantanamo for legislators who committed terrorist acts against PERS members and who continue to think of PERS as a sort of slush fund to bail out a state budget that's been assembled out of quicksand since 1990 when Ballot Measure 5 passed. The problems in Oregon aren't necessarily caused by a lack of money; they are almost assuredly caused by a pandemic lack of imagination, an epidemic shortage of intelligence, a millimeter deep gene pool, insatiable corporate greed, and a congenital absence of a spine - all collected together in that group of stuffed shirt legislators that keep getting sent back to Salem to do ------------------ absolutely nothing, in cahoots with governor after governor each actively trying to do worse than his/her predecessor. At the 'eye of this stupidity storm' are PERS members and retirees who ended up with a system, not of their making, that turned out to benefit them in retirement (AS PROMISED FROM DAY 1) in a way that working for substandard salaries did not during their working life.
As I noted yesterday, there are no fewer than 300,000 PERS members, retirees, beneficiaries, spouses, and children who are of voting age in Oregon. This is one of the most accurate cross-sections of Oregon I've ever run into. We live east of the Cascades; we live west of the Cascades; we live in urban centers and in rural outposts and everywhere in between. We vote Democrat, we vote Republican, we vote Independent, we vote Libertarian, we vote Socialist. We're pro-choice, we're anti-abortion, we're pro-Union, anti-Union, pro-schools, anti-schools, neutral about schools, for tax increases, against tax increases, we're pro-death penalty, anti-death penalty, pro-assisted suicide, anti-assisted suicide. We go to church, to synagogue, to mosque, or we don't worship to any higher deity. No matter how you slice us and dice us, the most you can say is that we are not monolithic in our political beliefs, our religious beliefs, or our social beliefs. Yet, for all this diversity, most of us feel unity in the belief that we've been betrayed by all the efforts to "reform" PERS and we take it very personally that we've been singled out for some sort of karmic retribution by the very people (not literally) who developed the system for our retirement, and who now feel that an injustice was done to employers and to taxpayers for which WE must now pay. Our history and the facts of our stories mean nothing do them - they're inconvenient details that don't fit the narrative the media is telling and the politicians spouting, and so must be ignored, rewritten, or massaged. They conveniently forget that the PERS system was foist on us; we didn't get to pick it or choose it. It came with the jobs. So what if we figured out after years of salary freezes, salary cuts, cost-of-living increases that barely kept some members off food stamps, that the PERS system was the ONLY compensatory aspect of our salaries that made the jobs economically viable. We scrimped, saved, and suffered self-deprivation during our working lives so that we wouldn't have to do this quite as aggressively when we stopped working in our later years. For this, we get what? A swift kick in the ass, a cut in retirement benefits, and a goodbye tantamount to saying: "Don't let the door hit your butt on the way out. So long you greedy SOB. Have a nice life" Oh, you don't like it: "Sue me".
And so my PERS friends (and those of you who I wouldn't exactly call 'friends'), there you have it. You understand now why I want to take all of that social, economic, and religious diversity of the PERS family and just turn it upside down, turn it inside out, and just shake the living daylights out of the apathy, enmity and animus that exists towards us in the halls of power. To do this, we have to set aside all our differences and unite in a common purpose. If you're a Democrat and you've been screwed over by another Democrat, throw the rascal into disco inferno. If you're a Republican, and you've been cavity-searched by another Republican, put him/her in the penalty box -- for life. You need to release yourself from the shackles of the logic that "...the devil you know is somehow better than the devil you don't know". It is that reasoning that allows these people to get elected and re-elected. They take your vote for granted; they capitalize on your altruistic tendencies, or your selfish tendencies, or your mean-spirited tendencies, or your 'greater good' tendencies. And we are suckered everytime, like lambs being led to slaughter. It is time to work outside your normal comfort zone, to become unpredictible, and to think outside the box. Put all the other important issues aside, just once. Ask yourself whether that juicy tax cut the Republicans might be offering you is worth the price you're going to pay out of future PERS benefits? As yourself whether those added dollars the Democrats want to throw at the public schools really does you any good at all if you're paying a disproportionate share as a result of potential tax increases and reduced salaries and benefits (particularly PERS benefits). At the moment, all the political posturing is over an essentially zero sum game. The ONLY way someone else can gain is if someone else loses - and PERS members, as a group, seem to be the current [close your eyes here for a moment if my words offend] "niggers", "jews", "muslims", "wetbacks" [Please don't be offended by my choice of words here. I mean no disrespect or intolerance of any of these groups, but I really want to let people know how it feels to be a PERS retiree at the moment. I truly do understand how it feels to be discriminated against as I fall into one of the categories described above, and have an adopted daughter in another of those categories. I know wherefrom I speak].
Throw off the shackles of consistency and predictibility. Let's let the politicos know that we won't support them under any circumstances, even if this runs contrary to our interests in other areas. Let's remind them that we, too, understand Howard Beale's scream: "We're mad as hell and we're not going to take it any more". Let's consign the SOBs to that purgatory called Disco Inferno, where power and 50 cent won't get you a ride on Tri-Met.
Disco Inferno is a place I think about regularly. Imagine a place where all elected officials (and the unelected or self-appointed ones too) could be sent to suffer through endless reruns of "Saturday Night Fever", polyester disco suits, Donna Summer's pantingingly puerile lyrics, "Welcome Back, Kotter", and maybe with the Village People thrown in for added torture. Think of this as a Guantanamo for legislators who committed terrorist acts against PERS members and who continue to think of PERS as a sort of slush fund to bail out a state budget that's been assembled out of quicksand since 1990 when Ballot Measure 5 passed. The problems in Oregon aren't necessarily caused by a lack of money; they are almost assuredly caused by a pandemic lack of imagination, an epidemic shortage of intelligence, a millimeter deep gene pool, insatiable corporate greed, and a congenital absence of a spine - all collected together in that group of stuffed shirt legislators that keep getting sent back to Salem to do ------------------ absolutely nothing, in cahoots with governor after governor each actively trying to do worse than his/her predecessor. At the 'eye of this stupidity storm' are PERS members and retirees who ended up with a system, not of their making, that turned out to benefit them in retirement (AS PROMISED FROM DAY 1) in a way that working for substandard salaries did not during their working life.
As I noted yesterday, there are no fewer than 300,000 PERS members, retirees, beneficiaries, spouses, and children who are of voting age in Oregon. This is one of the most accurate cross-sections of Oregon I've ever run into. We live east of the Cascades; we live west of the Cascades; we live in urban centers and in rural outposts and everywhere in between. We vote Democrat, we vote Republican, we vote Independent, we vote Libertarian, we vote Socialist. We're pro-choice, we're anti-abortion, we're pro-Union, anti-Union, pro-schools, anti-schools, neutral about schools, for tax increases, against tax increases, we're pro-death penalty, anti-death penalty, pro-assisted suicide, anti-assisted suicide. We go to church, to synagogue, to mosque, or we don't worship to any higher deity. No matter how you slice us and dice us, the most you can say is that we are not monolithic in our political beliefs, our religious beliefs, or our social beliefs. Yet, for all this diversity, most of us feel unity in the belief that we've been betrayed by all the efforts to "reform" PERS and we take it very personally that we've been singled out for some sort of karmic retribution by the very people (not literally) who developed the system for our retirement, and who now feel that an injustice was done to employers and to taxpayers for which WE must now pay. Our history and the facts of our stories mean nothing do them - they're inconvenient details that don't fit the narrative the media is telling and the politicians spouting, and so must be ignored, rewritten, or massaged. They conveniently forget that the PERS system was foist on us; we didn't get to pick it or choose it. It came with the jobs. So what if we figured out after years of salary freezes, salary cuts, cost-of-living increases that barely kept some members off food stamps, that the PERS system was the ONLY compensatory aspect of our salaries that made the jobs economically viable. We scrimped, saved, and suffered self-deprivation during our working lives so that we wouldn't have to do this quite as aggressively when we stopped working in our later years. For this, we get what? A swift kick in the ass, a cut in retirement benefits, and a goodbye tantamount to saying: "Don't let the door hit your butt on the way out. So long you greedy SOB. Have a nice life" Oh, you don't like it: "Sue me".
And so my PERS friends (and those of you who I wouldn't exactly call 'friends'), there you have it. You understand now why I want to take all of that social, economic, and religious diversity of the PERS family and just turn it upside down, turn it inside out, and just shake the living daylights out of the apathy, enmity and animus that exists towards us in the halls of power. To do this, we have to set aside all our differences and unite in a common purpose. If you're a Democrat and you've been screwed over by another Democrat, throw the rascal into disco inferno. If you're a Republican, and you've been cavity-searched by another Republican, put him/her in the penalty box -- for life. You need to release yourself from the shackles of the logic that "...the devil you know is somehow better than the devil you don't know". It is that reasoning that allows these people to get elected and re-elected. They take your vote for granted; they capitalize on your altruistic tendencies, or your selfish tendencies, or your mean-spirited tendencies, or your 'greater good' tendencies. And we are suckered everytime, like lambs being led to slaughter. It is time to work outside your normal comfort zone, to become unpredictible, and to think outside the box. Put all the other important issues aside, just once. Ask yourself whether that juicy tax cut the Republicans might be offering you is worth the price you're going to pay out of future PERS benefits? As yourself whether those added dollars the Democrats want to throw at the public schools really does you any good at all if you're paying a disproportionate share as a result of potential tax increases and reduced salaries and benefits (particularly PERS benefits). At the moment, all the political posturing is over an essentially zero sum game. The ONLY way someone else can gain is if someone else loses - and PERS members, as a group, seem to be the current [close your eyes here for a moment if my words offend] "niggers", "jews", "muslims", "wetbacks" [Please don't be offended by my choice of words here. I mean no disrespect or intolerance of any of these groups, but I really want to let people know how it feels to be a PERS retiree at the moment. I truly do understand how it feels to be discriminated against as I fall into one of the categories described above, and have an adopted daughter in another of those categories. I know wherefrom I speak].
Throw off the shackles of consistency and predictibility. Let's let the politicos know that we won't support them under any circumstances, even if this runs contrary to our interests in other areas. Let's remind them that we, too, understand Howard Beale's scream: "We're mad as hell and we're not going to take it any more". Let's consign the SOBs to that purgatory called Disco Inferno, where power and 50 cent won't get you a ride on Tri-Met.
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