'I am done with it'

On the day after election day, Priscilla said, “I am done with it.”

The country is divided into two groups, she said.

“One group works and the other group takes. One believes you work to get ahead and the other believes it should have whatever it wants given to it. People in that group believe I work to pay for what they want.”

Put more simply: To the half that takes, people who work exist only to pay the takers.

The takers are in what she sometimes calls “minimum wage philosophy.”

“I am here, you have to pay me. Whether I do the work doesn’t matter. I am here, I am breathing. You have to pay me.”

Priscilla is right. One hundred percent, completely right.

You are lucky if you haven’t seen the minimum wage philosophy. The cashier at WalMart who does not speak, who does not look up, who takes things from the conveyor belt and scans the things and puts the things in plastic bags on the whirl-around, whose only words to you are, “Forty-eight fifty-seven,” and even then does not look at you, but at nothing because she sees nothing. Ever.

Big box stores, fast food places, DMV offices, tax offices …

This should be one of your leading thoughts: In a take and take country, the number of people with minimum wage philosophy will increase, and soon every person you met will think that way. Even the one in the mirror.