Snarky Facebookers Sneer At Retail Slave Troubles

Dear Snarky Facebookers: Die.

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Let me lay something out on the table. I love and support our troops. That's right, I said it. So don't flip out on me. In no way am I dissing the men and women who put thier lives at risk for our country.

My grandfather on dad's side was a radioman in Word War II. He was declared dead twice after attacks that wiped out two troops he was in. Both times he came back out of the bushes alive.

My dad was a Ship's Cook on a mine sweeper ship in the Vietnam War. His life was constantly at risk under the threat of a mine going *BOOM.*

My cousin has done two tours in Iraq. He's been shot at, and he has had to kill. He used a 50 caliber machine gun to chop a charging jeep in half. They later found an IED (improvised explosive device) inside that would have done terrible damage to him and the people he was stationed with.

Believe me, I get it when people want to snark at Wallmart slaves who are protesting at losing their Thanksgiving dinner when there are troops who are missing out entirely or may never go home except in a box covered by a flag.

HOWEVER...

While our troops are fighting for our rights overseas, the corporations in OUR OWN country are taking them away. Wallmart, Target, Best Buy, Khol’s, Macy’s, Kmart, Sears and Toy-R-Us are all using the threat of job loss, homelessness and starvation to bully employees into pandering to the whims of corporate greed. This is all in order to give a few hours more profit to a corporation who's CEO will never feel the loss of the entire company should it go bankrupt. 

Think about that.

Yes, I KNOW the problems retail workers are facing seem insignificant in comparison to loved ones being shot at, However, not every war is fought with bullets vs Germany, 'Nam, Iraq, or whatever demonized enemy happens to be in season at any particular time. Sometimes the war is fought against corporate incompetence and greed that ensures that the troops won't have a home to come back to. Instead it will be auctioned out from under the families who were making payments, barely, until corporate decided to save costs by 'letting go' of easily replaceable employees. And corporations feel that they can get away with anything because so many people are desperate to keep their jobs.

Let's look at some of the companies that have failed in the last 5 years...

• Blockbuster
• Borders
• Gottschalks
• Hollywood Video
• KB Toys
• Mervyns
• Saturn (cars)
• Shoe Pavilion
• Skybus Airlines
• Wachovia
• Washington Mutual

Let's not forget Hostess, that has crashed and burned (after 80 years) just a week before Thanksgiving, putting 18,500 people out of work. Yes we can argue all day about the factors that led to the destruction of these iconic companies, but the truth of the matter is, some of these companies got their precious 'bail outs' and failed to succeed even then. And when the companies went down, the big boss people who could have saved the companies, got their golden parachutes instead. They made the decisions that crushed the corporation but they don't suffer for it.

And why should they think that they SHOULD suffer? After all, it's not like they have to feel the repercussions of their incompetance. Their actions don't affect THEMSELVES.

Our troops fight for the American Dream, while corporations take that dream away anyway. What was the question again? "Tell me again how working on Thanksgiving ruins your holiday?" I just did. 

Comments

[Chicajojobe]

On holidays certain things need to happen:
- The sick and infirm need to be transported and receive medical care.
- Law and order needs to be maintained.
- Fires need to be put out.
- The power grid needs to run.
- And, yes, our country needs to be protected at home and abroad.

However, we do not need make greedy fucks capable of waking up from their food coma to trample each other to buy Chinese made crap while bitching about how lazy and incompetent the workers are because they ran out of on sale TVs.

And how come none of these snarky fucks were talking about the troops working on The 4th of July? I mentioned in my post that admid all the chest beating about patriotism and thanking service members no one seemed to notice that the troops were working while they had the day off. Not just in Afghanistan either. They were helping the police with crowd control at the National Mall in DC.

[register troll]

well said,my friends. im even contemplating walking out of one of my jobs for mistreatment. Retail clerks have been bullied by corporate fuckbags for far too long and its time we do something about it

[Sales Agent Guy]

That's the problem with corporations, they see Black Friday as a chance to get big money. They see their workers as nothing more as the pass-between for the money from the customers going to the corporations.

[Queer Geek]

Here here. I would love for these snarky asswipes to work a service industry job where they are treated like crap, paid horribly, and are forced to work their holidays all for the sake of a Black Friday deal.

[Hopea]

Ok, I have a question. It isn't my intention to be rude, I am simply curious about a statement of yours and I don't want to be misunderstood.

"While our troops are fighting for our rights overseas."

This struck me as odd as I can't really see how the nations you are fighting are a threat to your rights. Could you (or anyone else here) elaborate on this, please?

[Ilia]

@Hopea
Well, for a long, involved answer, you can do research on Nazi Germany, Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Vietnam war and Al Qaeda, focusing particularly on how they are/were a threat to us.

A shorter explanation without all that darn research would be that our soldiers are fighting to keep the world safer, and that world includes us. Terrorism is a threat to anyone and any nation...it blossoms in the Middle East and will continue to do so without education and our help. One of the main enemies of Al Qaeda is the United States, so allowing it to grow unchecked is a threat to us. It is not just freedom of speech, and the rights that this country is founded on, but freedom from fear. Look at the changes our country has seen since 9/11.

Allowing terrorism to grow will make what we are going through now look like a piece of cake. Going to the airport is now an all day affair with body checks, luggage checks, etc....we don't want this to get worse!

We have nuclear weapons. We are not alone in having them. If terrorists gain control of such weapons (even one!) the cost in human lives can be unheard of!

We have no desire to be "the world's policemen." But, allowing sanctuaries for the extremists in the world to recruit, train, and build their movements, will insure that our national security will become more tenuous.

We have porous borders. Can you picture an army of millions invading the USA? Doing so is easy: picture all our illegal aliens coming across our borders at one time. Or you can picture a single infiltrator carrying a single nuclear, suitcase bomb to the heart of one of our major cities like Los Angeles and setting it off. Were that to happen, few would argue that we should have done less elsewhere in the world to protect ourselves.

We can argue about whether or not "Bush's War" was right or wrong, but when our soldiers go off to fight battles, keep in mind that they are fighting against a threat to this country. So, they may not be waving around the US Constitution in front of an enemy soldier's face before they pull the trigger, but they are decreasing the threat to those rights.

[thatryanguy]

Simply put, either everyone in the world gets to complain about the problems that they personally face in their lives, or the only person in the world allowed to complain is the blind mute starving quadriplegic albino African homeless girl who has no limbs, a sun allergy, and an aggravated family of brown recluse spiders crawling all over her.

[March]

Ilia, there are many, many false premises in your last comment and I won't bore our readers with pointing them all out. I'll leave it at advising you most earnestly to stop regurgitating Homeland Security honcho speak and do some darn research of your own.

(Of course, if what you say IS the result of extensive and critical research, I would love it if you would share your sources.)