GWOT V - According To Their Needs
Nov. 10th, 2024 07:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
drewkittyGWOT V - According To Their Needs
Acts 4:35
"... and put [the donated money] at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone who had need."
I continued my private correspondence with Pat long after my tour as Warden at Alviso Prison had ended.
Both of us were keenly aware that leaders must not play favorites.
The Governator - one of many unflattering slang titles - had no business speaking to someone so far separated from hir in the military chain of command.
I was one of thousands of Captains in California's service.
But there was only one Pat. A true force of nature.
From time to time, Pat violated the principle of chain of command by issuing me an order.
The order would duly make its way down the chain until the right person gave it to me as an order. But Pat and I would have E-mailed back and forth about it at length first.
Usually this took the form of a fact finding mission. Go here and find this out. Rarely took me more than a day or two. The San Francisco thing took me just under a week.
Lots of people will tell a lowly Captain things they could not tell "California's colonizer of the Uncanny Valley."
Also from time to time, I would not ask Pat for a favor. I would never ask Pat for a favor, for my entire career. But Pat would occasionally decide that something would benefit a few hundred thousand other Californians, and also happen to benefit me.
The one that did not benefit me, directly or indirectly, was the one that really really troubled Pat. To the point that Pat was literally losing sleep, snapping at staff, and even had trouble eating.
###
To: 18
From: Pat
Hey. How's things on the Border?
If you have a few spare minutes, I need to vent at someone who is very far removed from a big problem. Game?
To: Pat
From: E
The Border is a scrambling clusterfuck, but it always was under the Americans too. I'm keeping my force in being, a presence on the Border, building good relationships with Campos Nation, and reminding the Mexicans how we got rid of the Americans. It's enough.
I shudder to think of what YOU consider a big problem. You flipped an entire state and chased the Americans out.
How can I help?
To: E
From: P
Well, fuck.
Between the Firecracker War and Homeland and the draft and those who fled a free California, I'm responsible for the fates of twenty million people. Not thirty million. By this much are we diminished.
Almost a third of them are useless. Mouths to feed, bodies to clothe, healthcare and education. So many broken and damaged people, in body and in mind. Orphans, lone elders, paraplegics, the insane and the helpless. The detrius of nuclear war, Homeland camps and the Resistance struggle.
Red Lion has been screeching about it for months, but they didn't put numbers on it.
I finally beat the numbers out of the Psyche General and the Surgeon General yesterday. They didn't want to tell me. Seven million people who aren't able bodied, and have no prospect of recovery and _cannot_ even earn their keep. An anvil chained around the ankle - no, the neck - of the California we are desperately trying to build.
Every time the financial people run the numbers, we can't carry them. No one wants them - no emigration. Of course no help from the Americans or anyone else for that matter.
I won't dispose of them. I simply stubbornly morally will not.
So what can I do?
###
That was dangerously close to Pat asking me to give Pat an order. And that simply would not be something I could lend myself to.
The command datalink between McNasty and the rest of the world included full access to the California University. So I could construct the problem and rough up some variables.
I called in my XO.
"Congratulations. You just inherited command of Campos Sector. I was out doing one of my inspections and stopped a bullet with my face. Run things for a week - no, ten days - and I'll evaluate your performance. Literally don't bother me for anything, I don't care how bad, unless the Mexicans pull a full invasion."
I advised my boss by E-mail of my delegation of command authority and charged off ten days of personal leave.
###
Sociology had been a science I had dabbled in. Political science and economics informed it, but did not dictate it.
If you ask an economist, they will always tell you that their art dictates what is possible and what is not possible.
If you had asked an economist about the first flight to the Moon, they would have told you it was not something that America could afford.
A decade earlier, you could have asked about nuclear weapons - after swearing them to secrecy and force feeding them decades of physics - and been told the same answer. Can't afford it. No Manhattan Project for you.
A decade after, it was obvious that America could not afford the Vietnam War. It had been so very costly, in every way.
Yet men walked on the Moon, we invented nuclear bombs and we fought that war.
Economics is illusion. That was the first part of my answer for Pat.
###
So I pulled together some rough numbers on those seven million people. Verified the basic figure. Looked at what they could be asked to do and not do.
It was pretty fucking grim.
The bedlams I'd discovered during my tenure at Alviso continued in full operation. Not only were hundreds of thousands of Californians in these facilities, but the people who had to run the facilities weren't available to be doing any of the other things we needed. Every effort was made to create placements for the severely mentally ill, but between one thing and another, the choices were the bedlam or the streets. And we weren't barbarian enough to leave our mentally ill in the open air to suffer and die. One place where our ethics in fact exceeded our peaceful ancestors.
The California University was training those of us who could be trained. But they were a sharpening stone, for the elite.
The Military Department was recruiting at fever pitch. But fewer and fewer Californians could meet basic military standards, who were not already in BDUs.
Primary and secondary education was picking back up. But as many adults as children needed basic educations now, and could not access them because they were literally too old. The barely funded adult schools of the idyllic pre-Firecracker age were one with last year's snows.
Last but not least, the Medical Cities - our hospital-towns - were at full stretch providing health care to as many Californians as possible. They already were a Manhattan Project, doing everything that could be done regardless of costs.
###
To: GovCal
From: Captain Echo 18, Campos Sector, Southern Operational Region, California Border Force, Army of the California Republic
Governor,
I ran a bunch of numbers and wrote a thirty page analysis (attached) that essentially confirms what you have been told.
Economics is an illusion. Some cost-benefit geek can say that someone's work is of less value than their output. But we don't measure lives in calories or in minutes, nor should we measure quality of life and living in CaliBucks or gold fragments.
Marx wrote, "From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs."
You've been accused of being a Marxist, among all the other things you've been accused of, but on this one topic, you and I are both die hard Marxists.
"Only the mission can make me leave a comrade behind."
I swore that oath. The people of the state of California are our comrades. As our mission is their safety and well being, I can't abandon my mission to abandon my mission. We must, we shall, we HAVE TO care for our people whether there are seven, seventy, seven hundred, seven thousand, seven hundred thousand or even more, who cannot help us do it.
I can suggest some greasing of the skids that will help some.
- Maximum effort to find placements in California's basic institutions for everyone who can work, according to their limitations. There have to be a ton of housekeeping and laundry jobs in the Medical Cities. I remember that the company that made fire hoses for the Forest Service was made up mostly of blind people. There used to be 'street teams' of homeless paid and fed to pick up trash. There was the Americans with Disabilities Act or the ADA. We probably need a CDA, a Californians with Disabilities Act, and maybe a requirement to employ as many as we can. Maybe tie it to state contracts?
- I am sure my big bosses will shit themselves sideways, but the California Military Department should be able to make use of nearly any human material. I don't suggest that we resurrect Homeland's Special Troops - who were often very Special and criminal in nature - but there have to be all sorts of non combat and logistics jobs that would support the CMD that could be done by the developmentally or combat disabled. Legs blown off? Recruiter. Can't hear? Computers.
I wouldn't even rule out the disabled in combat arms. You don't need legs to command a tank. Drive one? Maybe. Gun one? Maybe not.
- There is a long history of putting prisoners to work in the fire service and in agriculture. Couldn't the same techniques be used to put marginal people to work in those jobs as well? Easier even as many will want to work?
- Incentive payments to California families for adopting people who can't care for themselves. Suggest that this be explicity allowed for family to claim to take care of their family members - but also non traditional and newly formed families. I'd rather see a thousand one-person family bedlams than a bureaucratic bedlam with a thousand people all alone together.
- We have a huge child care problem. We have a huge elder care problem. Have the grandparents take care of the grandkids. Winning.
- Historically, we have separated our schools into preschool / kindergarten, primary grades, junior high and high schools, and community colleges. Do we really have time for this age based hierarchical bullshit? Why not make the larger schools into all-age facilities supporting an all age community? Obviously there will need to be procedural and security separations to protect children and vulnerable populations, but I was always disgusted by the idea of the teenage mom forced either to drop out of school or to continue her education at a smaller, lesser school.
Mix it all up. Not just the schools, but our entire civilization and culture.
Take Your Grandma To Work Day, every day. Nursing mothers covering the front desk. Elderly janitors. Fifteen year old firefighters. Not soldiers, the whole child soldier thing after all. But maybe child labor laws need to be revisited too.
Save them all. Put them all to work.
We are desperate. Maybe we can't afford it.
I know we cannot afford not to try.
Yours to command,
Echo 18
###
From: P
To: E
Thank you, thank you, thank you!
###
My XO did a good job. Her numbers weren't quite as good as mine, but she hadn't been running stuff for years and years either. She didn't get anyone killed, which was better than my performance on a bad day.
The Californians With Disabilities Act sailed through the Legislature.
McNasty - in other words, I - was sent a 'work team' of fourteen developmentally disabled adults to work as submilitary contractors. They could only work on base at non hazardous tasks. They came with two Conservationists - one deaf, one who used a walker and had a colostomy. But they could run their laborers and keep them safe. Sixteen more mouths to feed. I didn't think they would earn their keep. I was wrong. Just by being pointed out as good examples to my Dirty Deltas, they played their parts.
The California job postings exploded. So many jobs now. A bit more verbiage defining what they could do and not do.
From each according to their abilities.
What it costs is what it costs. However long it takes, is how long it takes. Maybe it's inefficient. Maybe it's dangerous. Maybe bad things are going to happen.
Bad things did happen. Vulnerable people were injured in work accidents, overworked, abused, hurt badly and in several cases killed. Not at McNasty, not on my watch. But there were abuses, and not all those abuses were caught and punished.
CAL-OSHA worked overtime and double time to try to create safe workplaces. Sometimes they succeeded.
On balance, though, we did not lose nearly as many as if we left them all on the streets to suffer and die, as a peaceful pre-Firecracker America had.
We needed not to abandon our people. It made us different from America and especially from Homeland.
A new motto spread through our propaganda.
"No one left behind," we ordered and we begged and we pleaded and we bragged.
No one.
Left.
Behind.
Our people.
We don't dump Grandma on the street because she's old and feeble. She can tell stories. She may not be able to cook and clean, but she can tell you how. Dreaming in front of the TV, she's a status symbol, a living piece of hope for the rest of us, that we will not be abandoned in our turn when it is our time.
Eventually the economists coined a term for what we were doing.
"Humanocentric socialism."
More bullshit. But flavored for modern palates.
Acts 4:35
"... and put [the donated money] at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone who had need."
I continued my private correspondence with Pat long after my tour as Warden at Alviso Prison had ended.
Both of us were keenly aware that leaders must not play favorites.
The Governator - one of many unflattering slang titles - had no business speaking to someone so far separated from hir in the military chain of command.
I was one of thousands of Captains in California's service.
But there was only one Pat. A true force of nature.
From time to time, Pat violated the principle of chain of command by issuing me an order.
The order would duly make its way down the chain until the right person gave it to me as an order. But Pat and I would have E-mailed back and forth about it at length first.
Usually this took the form of a fact finding mission. Go here and find this out. Rarely took me more than a day or two. The San Francisco thing took me just under a week.
Lots of people will tell a lowly Captain things they could not tell "California's colonizer of the Uncanny Valley."
Also from time to time, I would not ask Pat for a favor. I would never ask Pat for a favor, for my entire career. But Pat would occasionally decide that something would benefit a few hundred thousand other Californians, and also happen to benefit me.
The one that did not benefit me, directly or indirectly, was the one that really really troubled Pat. To the point that Pat was literally losing sleep, snapping at staff, and even had trouble eating.
###
To: 18
From: Pat
Hey. How's things on the Border?
If you have a few spare minutes, I need to vent at someone who is very far removed from a big problem. Game?
To: Pat
From: E
The Border is a scrambling clusterfuck, but it always was under the Americans too. I'm keeping my force in being, a presence on the Border, building good relationships with Campos Nation, and reminding the Mexicans how we got rid of the Americans. It's enough.
I shudder to think of what YOU consider a big problem. You flipped an entire state and chased the Americans out.
How can I help?
To: E
From: P
Well, fuck.
Between the Firecracker War and Homeland and the draft and those who fled a free California, I'm responsible for the fates of twenty million people. Not thirty million. By this much are we diminished.
Almost a third of them are useless. Mouths to feed, bodies to clothe, healthcare and education. So many broken and damaged people, in body and in mind. Orphans, lone elders, paraplegics, the insane and the helpless. The detrius of nuclear war, Homeland camps and the Resistance struggle.
Red Lion has been screeching about it for months, but they didn't put numbers on it.
I finally beat the numbers out of the Psyche General and the Surgeon General yesterday. They didn't want to tell me. Seven million people who aren't able bodied, and have no prospect of recovery and _cannot_ even earn their keep. An anvil chained around the ankle - no, the neck - of the California we are desperately trying to build.
Every time the financial people run the numbers, we can't carry them. No one wants them - no emigration. Of course no help from the Americans or anyone else for that matter.
I won't dispose of them. I simply stubbornly morally will not.
So what can I do?
###
That was dangerously close to Pat asking me to give Pat an order. And that simply would not be something I could lend myself to.
The command datalink between McNasty and the rest of the world included full access to the California University. So I could construct the problem and rough up some variables.
I called in my XO.
"Congratulations. You just inherited command of Campos Sector. I was out doing one of my inspections and stopped a bullet with my face. Run things for a week - no, ten days - and I'll evaluate your performance. Literally don't bother me for anything, I don't care how bad, unless the Mexicans pull a full invasion."
I advised my boss by E-mail of my delegation of command authority and charged off ten days of personal leave.
###
Sociology had been a science I had dabbled in. Political science and economics informed it, but did not dictate it.
If you ask an economist, they will always tell you that their art dictates what is possible and what is not possible.
If you had asked an economist about the first flight to the Moon, they would have told you it was not something that America could afford.
A decade earlier, you could have asked about nuclear weapons - after swearing them to secrecy and force feeding them decades of physics - and been told the same answer. Can't afford it. No Manhattan Project for you.
A decade after, it was obvious that America could not afford the Vietnam War. It had been so very costly, in every way.
Yet men walked on the Moon, we invented nuclear bombs and we fought that war.
Economics is illusion. That was the first part of my answer for Pat.
###
So I pulled together some rough numbers on those seven million people. Verified the basic figure. Looked at what they could be asked to do and not do.
It was pretty fucking grim.
The bedlams I'd discovered during my tenure at Alviso continued in full operation. Not only were hundreds of thousands of Californians in these facilities, but the people who had to run the facilities weren't available to be doing any of the other things we needed. Every effort was made to create placements for the severely mentally ill, but between one thing and another, the choices were the bedlam or the streets. And we weren't barbarian enough to leave our mentally ill in the open air to suffer and die. One place where our ethics in fact exceeded our peaceful ancestors.
The California University was training those of us who could be trained. But they were a sharpening stone, for the elite.
The Military Department was recruiting at fever pitch. But fewer and fewer Californians could meet basic military standards, who were not already in BDUs.
Primary and secondary education was picking back up. But as many adults as children needed basic educations now, and could not access them because they were literally too old. The barely funded adult schools of the idyllic pre-Firecracker age were one with last year's snows.
Last but not least, the Medical Cities - our hospital-towns - were at full stretch providing health care to as many Californians as possible. They already were a Manhattan Project, doing everything that could be done regardless of costs.
###
To: GovCal
From: Captain Echo 18, Campos Sector, Southern Operational Region, California Border Force, Army of the California Republic
Governor,
I ran a bunch of numbers and wrote a thirty page analysis (attached) that essentially confirms what you have been told.
Economics is an illusion. Some cost-benefit geek can say that someone's work is of less value than their output. But we don't measure lives in calories or in minutes, nor should we measure quality of life and living in CaliBucks or gold fragments.
Marx wrote, "From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs."
You've been accused of being a Marxist, among all the other things you've been accused of, but on this one topic, you and I are both die hard Marxists.
"Only the mission can make me leave a comrade behind."
I swore that oath. The people of the state of California are our comrades. As our mission is their safety and well being, I can't abandon my mission to abandon my mission. We must, we shall, we HAVE TO care for our people whether there are seven, seventy, seven hundred, seven thousand, seven hundred thousand or even more, who cannot help us do it.
I can suggest some greasing of the skids that will help some.
- Maximum effort to find placements in California's basic institutions for everyone who can work, according to their limitations. There have to be a ton of housekeeping and laundry jobs in the Medical Cities. I remember that the company that made fire hoses for the Forest Service was made up mostly of blind people. There used to be 'street teams' of homeless paid and fed to pick up trash. There was the Americans with Disabilities Act or the ADA. We probably need a CDA, a Californians with Disabilities Act, and maybe a requirement to employ as many as we can. Maybe tie it to state contracts?
- I am sure my big bosses will shit themselves sideways, but the California Military Department should be able to make use of nearly any human material. I don't suggest that we resurrect Homeland's Special Troops - who were often very Special and criminal in nature - but there have to be all sorts of non combat and logistics jobs that would support the CMD that could be done by the developmentally or combat disabled. Legs blown off? Recruiter. Can't hear? Computers.
I wouldn't even rule out the disabled in combat arms. You don't need legs to command a tank. Drive one? Maybe. Gun one? Maybe not.
- There is a long history of putting prisoners to work in the fire service and in agriculture. Couldn't the same techniques be used to put marginal people to work in those jobs as well? Easier even as many will want to work?
- Incentive payments to California families for adopting people who can't care for themselves. Suggest that this be explicity allowed for family to claim to take care of their family members - but also non traditional and newly formed families. I'd rather see a thousand one-person family bedlams than a bureaucratic bedlam with a thousand people all alone together.
- We have a huge child care problem. We have a huge elder care problem. Have the grandparents take care of the grandkids. Winning.
- Historically, we have separated our schools into preschool / kindergarten, primary grades, junior high and high schools, and community colleges. Do we really have time for this age based hierarchical bullshit? Why not make the larger schools into all-age facilities supporting an all age community? Obviously there will need to be procedural and security separations to protect children and vulnerable populations, but I was always disgusted by the idea of the teenage mom forced either to drop out of school or to continue her education at a smaller, lesser school.
Mix it all up. Not just the schools, but our entire civilization and culture.
Take Your Grandma To Work Day, every day. Nursing mothers covering the front desk. Elderly janitors. Fifteen year old firefighters. Not soldiers, the whole child soldier thing after all. But maybe child labor laws need to be revisited too.
Save them all. Put them all to work.
We are desperate. Maybe we can't afford it.
I know we cannot afford not to try.
Yours to command,
Echo 18
###
From: P
To: E
Thank you, thank you, thank you!
###
My XO did a good job. Her numbers weren't quite as good as mine, but she hadn't been running stuff for years and years either. She didn't get anyone killed, which was better than my performance on a bad day.
The Californians With Disabilities Act sailed through the Legislature.
McNasty - in other words, I - was sent a 'work team' of fourteen developmentally disabled adults to work as submilitary contractors. They could only work on base at non hazardous tasks. They came with two Conservationists - one deaf, one who used a walker and had a colostomy. But they could run their laborers and keep them safe. Sixteen more mouths to feed. I didn't think they would earn their keep. I was wrong. Just by being pointed out as good examples to my Dirty Deltas, they played their parts.
The California job postings exploded. So many jobs now. A bit more verbiage defining what they could do and not do.
From each according to their abilities.
What it costs is what it costs. However long it takes, is how long it takes. Maybe it's inefficient. Maybe it's dangerous. Maybe bad things are going to happen.
Bad things did happen. Vulnerable people were injured in work accidents, overworked, abused, hurt badly and in several cases killed. Not at McNasty, not on my watch. But there were abuses, and not all those abuses were caught and punished.
CAL-OSHA worked overtime and double time to try to create safe workplaces. Sometimes they succeeded.
On balance, though, we did not lose nearly as many as if we left them all on the streets to suffer and die, as a peaceful pre-Firecracker America had.
We needed not to abandon our people. It made us different from America and especially from Homeland.
A new motto spread through our propaganda.
"No one left behind," we ordered and we begged and we pleaded and we bragged.
No one.
Left.
Behind.
Our people.
We don't dump Grandma on the street because she's old and feeble. She can tell stories. She may not be able to cook and clean, but she can tell you how. Dreaming in front of the TV, she's a status symbol, a living piece of hope for the rest of us, that we will not be abandoned in our turn when it is our time.
Eventually the economists coined a term for what we were doing.
"Humanocentric socialism."
More bullshit. But flavored for modern palates.
