​To Pee, or Not To Pee?

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

Should That Be a Question on the Job in the Richest Country in the World?

Back in the 17th century, Hamlet in Shakespeare’s play mused about life and death, heaven, purgatory and hell, religion, and whether suicide might be an answer to all of life’s problems in the greatest soliloquy ever written. Here are a few lines:

To be, or not to be, that is the question; whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them. To die – to sleep, no more; and by a sleep to say we end the heartaches and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to,

‘tis a consummation devoutly to be wish’d.

To die, to sleep; to sleep, perchance to dream

--ay, there’s the rub.

Jeff Bezos’ Amazon employs 1.6 million workers in the DSA, with well over one million working in the “fulfillment center” warehouses where orders are collected, boxed, and trucked or flown to thousands of destinations. The average Amazon warehouse worker works for eight months and then skedaddles. Why? Maybe a 21st century Shakespeare has the answer:

To pee, or not to pee, that is the hourly question;

can I make it to the toilet which seems a mile away,

or is it nobler for my paycheck, to pee in my soaked diaper?

Or should I maintain the pace of a speedy robot, working with great speed,

with constant monitoring by computers and algorithms that check my every move and every failure? it is a future to devoutly fear and hate,

thinking of never getting a pay raise or a thank-you from the Devil

in this Amazon Hell.

Why Does Bezos Treat His Warehouse Workers Like Robots and Slaves?

Because he can. It’s always about money. At the current rate of workers quitting after eight months of stress, physical injuries, and fear, Amazon has to hire more than 500,000 new workers every year to keep the “prime” boxes flowing. Some say Bezos has copied the labor conditions of the factory farms where workers at meat and poultry processing plants have to wear diapers to keep the cutting lines going as they whack drumsticks and back ribs. No time for breaks, for urinating, defecating, or quick rests.

Some critics say that if Amazon had strong unionized labor, some workers might stay for eight years. But Bezos does not want experienced labor or long-term human robots. They would strike for more pay, better hours, and to reduce Amazon’s world records for causing physical injuries on site in the world of warehousing. Amazon has twice the injuries of other warehouse units across the country. Such a labor plan makes him the second richest man in the world.

By the way, the other 155 million workers in the Divided States of America average four years on one job instead of the eight months at Amazon.

Bezos on occasion talks about making Amazon workers the “Earth’s best.” He detests unions because they might possibly keep him from enjoying moments of weightlessness in his personal rockets. Amazon executives in charge of finding new hires have been described as being terrified by the constant stress of looking for fresh bodies to hire – and tracking fired workers going out the door.

Amazon has made breaking labor laws regarding union recruitment a daily habit. It is constantly charged with confiscating pro-union literature, firing workers who have distributed pro-union flyers, and posting anti-union posters in every toilet stall. Amazon has replaced Walmart as the most anti-union business in America.

Evidently Bezos thinks he hasn’t enough yet. What more could he want? A mansion in space for a retreat? He no doubt holds the world title for owning the most private bathrooms. He owns mansions around the world and his Washington, D,C, mansion alone has 27 bathrooms. His $500 million superyacht moored by a historical bridge (so far!) in Amsterdam must have more than a dozen. Will he never have enough? He’s a relatively young man.

In 2017 Amazon paid no taxes. In 2018 and 2019 it paid 1.2%. In 2020 it paid 5.1 %. In 2021 it paid 6.1%. It should have paid 21%, or $7.3 billion instead of $2.1 billion for 2021. I wonder if Bezos has read the story by Wyoming lawyer Gerry Spence of the wealthy man who bought up all the canned beans in the world and stored them behind tall barbed wire fences. He finally “had enough.”

Warning to Master Race: The Following Is Hazardous to Your Emotional Health!

With the Trumplicans concerned about their mental health if they happen upon any knowledge of the real history of the world, I want to warn what the prospective members of another Master Race masquerading as Trumplicans would call “legitimate political discourse.” Learning about the Holocaust will be dangerous to your emotional health.

The Master Race legislatures in Florida and other Trumplican states are preparing bills that would prohibit classroom lessons making students “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race.” As the following contains references to mass murder by firearms, poison gas, starvation, working slaves to death, and rape, beatings, and death-dealing medical experiments, these incidents could bring on the afore-mentioned “discomfort” which some people could never recover from.

On January 20, 1942, fifteen top members of the Nazi Master Race, led by Reinhard Heydrich, met at an elegant Wannsee villa near Berlin to plan the “Final Solution” for the Jews in the world, an estimated eleven million. Their plans resulted in an estimated death of six million Jews, homosexuals, political enemies, and mentally and physically handicapped persons before Adolf and Eva committed suicide in a Berlin bunker. Many top Nazis fled to friends in South America.

Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated in May of 1942 by Czech patriots. Hitler ordered the town of Lidice in Bohemia burned and leveled to the ground , that all men be executed, and the women and children be deported to slave and extermination camps. Of 503 inhabitants, 184 men were executed by machine guns, seven children who looked Master Race were raised by SS families and the rest of the women and children were sent to death camps where 60 women and 88 children were gassed. (Feel any discomfort?)

The Master Race Loved To Listen to Orchestra Music While Killing and Raping

In pre-World War II, Berlin and other German cities in the early 1930s had night clubs where many Jewish musicians entertained German drinkers and dancers. Jewish families often sacrificed to buy violins and cellos for their children to play. When the Nazi death camps started to feature death by gassing, the Master Race often had orchestras made up of Jewish prisoners welcome the trains filled with victims of the genocide so they wouldn’t expect gas chambers. Some said the finest classical music in Europe was played by Jews in extermination camps in order to stay alive. The death camps had marvelous collections of musical instruments taken from Jews as they arrived at the selection site of life as a slave or death by machinegun or gassing.

At Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, one of the many death camps in Europe, many concerts were impromptu and held at the whims of the SS. As SS guards tortured and shot Jews, the orchestras played. When the SS commanders and guards threw wild drunken parties at night, celebrating record-setting death days, the orchestras were forced to play. Often the orchestras were commanded to play in the women’s barracks at drunken parties at night. As the music played the SS would pull young Jewish girls and women from the bunks and rape them. (Feel any guilt yet?)

Jewish-Russian schoolteacher Genia Demianova survived Auschwitz but remembers the nights when she was tortured and gang raped while she heard the music and the clinking of glasses as she was battered and bleeding on the floor from being raped by a dozen SS. (Feel any anguish yet?)

SS Colonel Walter Blume, commander of one of the most notorious death squads, always had parties at night for his killers after a day of killing – and always “requested” an orchestra to accompany the singing troops. (Feel any psychological distress yet?)

When prisoners were lined up for execution, guards often requested the song “The Auschwitz Tango” to be played before the shooting started.The music had been written by a 12-year-old Jewish girl.

A Holocaust survivor said this about the music in the death camps: “The camps were full of hunger, illnesses, epidemics, and death, but the musical life of the camp was very rich. There were famous opera singers and high-ranking musicians. There were many performances. We didn’t know that the riders ended up in the gas chambers.” As many as 10,000 songs written in death camps have been collected and preserved-and there are 8,000 more to be studied. Many were written on toilet paper and coal sacks smuggled out of the camps.

The SS Celebration Called “Operation Harvest Festival” Should Be Remembered

On November 3, 1943, the largest single massacre of prisoners in one day took place at the Majdanek death camp. It was organized under the code name “Operation Harvest Festival.” While Jewish orchestras played Viennese waltzes, tangos, military marches, sentimental Schumann melodies, and other concert music over loudspeakers as part of this celebration of death, members of the Master Race shot and killed 18,000 Jewish men, women, and children. In testimony about war crimes after the war, an SS guard admitted hearing another exclaim: “It’s really nice to shoot to military march music.”

After the shooting stopped at the end of the day, the SS killers retreated to their quarters, had a wild party, and swilled vodka while still wearing uniforms covered in victim’s blood.

In a prior murderous day at the Ukrairian town of Cutnow, SS Master Race guards killed 400 Jewish men, women, and children after they had been marched to the grave site. The shooting was done while the orchestra played music described as “loud and like a carnival.” Hitler and his exterminators “normalized” killing with the fusion of alcohol, music, and song.

Remember, our American members of the Master Race sounded like the SS at the Charlottesville Nazi rally when they marched with torches and kept yelling the soul-chilling “Jews will not replace us!”

When we see members of the Proud Boys, Three Percenters, Oath Keepers, Michigan Militia, Boogaloos, and 200 other militias marching on our streets carrying Glocks and AR-15s with loaded magazines and wearing all kinds of Hawaiian shirts and armor and tactical gear, we still have people saying “It Can’t Happen Here.”

American men are not much different from the German men carrying Lugers and Sturmgewehr rifles and marching their victims, to orchestra music, to grave-pits across much of Europe. They have had Hitler and Trump as Great Leaders.

Perhaps those Americans might feel a little discomfort, a little guilt, a little anguish, a little remorse, and some psychological stress about what happened to six million Holocaust victims and to our millions of Blacks, Browns, Asians, and Native Americans over 400 years.

Have they learned enough history in pre-K-12 public and private schools to keep from repeating that horrible history in this country? We will know after the 2022 elections.