When people who are still wrong say I told you so
- March 8th, 2011
- By Mark Carras
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Daemon
There is nothing more frustrating than when people who are still wrong say “I told you so.” Now I have this one friend who constantly tells me I should ‘cover bigger bands’. This is not what I am talking about really. Because that friend never gives enough details to make any sense anyways. What does he mean by bigger? Bigger draw at venues? Bigger record sales? Bigger budgets spent to push them? Being on GMA? How much hype a band has means nothing. We all know that. I have seen bands with multimillion dollar budgets, appear on GMA, and then play to a half empty house at a 500 capacity club some Metal band packed two nights ago. That Metal band will never get on GMA. Hype means nothing. Record sales? This means nothing either anymore. The industry keeps a horrid record of such things so they can have a paper trail to prove why they don’t owe an artist. I could go on and on, but the truth is that telling someone like me they should cover bigger bands means nothing until you know enough about the industry to know what that means. The truth is that I have never rejected an interview because a band sold too many records. I never have an I never will.
Then there are people who have such wackado political ideas that you couldn’t do what they are calling you to do if you wanted to. It’s like the employee who tells a boss they are doing the wrong thing by closing shop after a business has failed. That employee doesn’t understand that their paycheck has to come from somewhere. They think that you have a choice to close the business or not. If the ledger doesn’t add up, it doesn’t add up. I have another friend who is against unions because some of his non-union friends don’t get paid as much as a union guy like me. I try to explain to him that the suits would love nothing more than to bring everyone down to that level, but the unions would rather bring every common worker up. Are you for the common worker or the suit trying to take advantage of said common worker? He can’t see that far. All he knows is that a friend isn’t making as much as another and it would be more fair if everyone got paid the same for the same work. He can’t comprehend paying everyone more. Only less.
Of course the knee jerk reaction argument that has been programmed into everyone’s head to that is that money doesn’t come out of nowhere. As I said before, if the ledger doesn’t add up, the ledger doesn’t add up. This has been a very impressive dupe. This is when bullshit is so stunning you have to stand in awe of the balls it takes for the suits to get the more gullible to believe it. While they buy their tenth vacation home, seventh yacht, and go on their 2nd monthly vacation, we work paycheck to paycheck cheering them on. No, this is not socialism I am pushing. What I am saying is that workers should get a living wage. Yes, we need some rich to fuel the dream so others are encouraged to work harder. But how rich do they need to be and how poor do we need to be. That is the question.
Pure Capitalism would destroy us. Pure Socialism would destroy us. It’s all about a balance between the two. Let’s say just as an example that a suit could gain one nice big yacht, a really nice vacation home, and two amazing vacations per year. This is way better than I will ever get in my life. But let’s say that if they cut down to that still extremely impressive lifestyle it would allow them to pay their grunt workers a livable wage. Is that socialism? No, because they are still annoyingly rich. We are still the grunts. Unions are not about paying an employee the most. They are about paying an employee the least amount possible to be considered fair. No one has ever made it rich being a union worker.
Yet, we still have the Glenn Beck fans, the Tea Party goofs, and the Rand Paul jokers saying ‘See I told you so.’ about things that make even less sense on the ledger. The problem is that their followers are too short sighted to look at the big picture to add up all the math. Cheaper, cheaper, cheaper, just means jobs are sent over seas. Or would it be a good thing to have the working conditions of China here is the U.S.? The truth is that this subject can’t be thoroughly discussed in one blog post. Maybe an entire book. Even better so it would have to be a series of college classes. It would have to be a mixture of history and economics to totally encompass all that has to be looked at. Otherwise all we are doing is puking out talking points that don’t even graze the surface. So until then people like me will have to play the fool on the hill when you short sighted types say, ‘I told you so’ without knowing how foolish you look with that foot in your mouth.
Can I ask you one favor? Please question your favorite news source. If your favorite news source calls into question all the third party (non-partisan) fact checking sites, maybe you shouldn’t trust them? If a news source is trying to make you think they are the only one true source run as fast as you can from them. Throughout history this always leads to some really scary stuff.
