Casual Cruelty

Whenever I watch something like The Underground Railroad or Handmaid’s Tale, the thing that always floors me is the casual cruelty depicted as a given in everyday life. And this cruelty is always so graphic, depicted in ways you can see, feel and taste… Ritual rape, whipping someone within an inch of their life at a dinner party then setting them aflame as entertainment, chaining someone to a corpse overnight as punishment.

I realize some of this is for shock value and dramatic tension — hence the accusation that it’s gratuitous torture porn — but I know all these things have happened and worse. It’s one of the reasons why the pause/play button is my friend. I have a strong stomach, but sometimes I have to take a break. I think, How could people live like that without their hearts exploding? How could they abide such casual cruelty?

Fortunately, since I stopped working, I no longer have to suffer casual cruelty on a daily basis. — and those cruelties I did suffer were minuscule potatoes compared to the examples enumerated in the first paragraph. Mostly, I endured verbal abuse from customers, and overheard managers discussing me within earshot like I was an old car that needed a tuneup. (A few thought they were being slick by doing it in Spanish, but — hot tip — Spanish is no longer the “secret language” to American English speakers that it used to be. We understand far more than you think.)

Towards the end of my tenure it was having the severity of my disability routinely questioned by customers, managers, and other team members. (“Oh I wish I got to sit down!”) And there was some ageism sprinkled in there too. (When our store’s app was introduced, management assumed I couldn’t learn how to use a smartphone because of my age. I fooled them all and became somewhat of an expert. I knew how that app worked on iOS and android.) Now all of this was mentally wearing for sure, but it didn’t break any bones or shed any blood, and I escaped with my life — although I did pass out on the job once, and had to spend a subsequent two nights in the hospital.

I have been fortunate to live in places that are relatively safe. There haven’t been shootings (although I have seen a few guns) and the police seldom have to visit. Occasionally there has been a domestic dispute (like late one night someone’s fed-up boyfriend threatened to throw their partner’s yapping poodle in the dumpster) but crime is relatively low. I’ve never had to live with daily shootings, gang warfare, or hard drugs.

And yet, less than 40 miles northeast of me, there are sometimes dozens of shootings in a single weekend. Every evening the local news recites a litany of the fallen, and even the newscaster sounds bored. There is a mass shooting in this country every day. I used to be shocked and sad, but now, I’m more ashamed and embarrassed. I wonder why we can’t get our act together. The solutions are fairly simple, and most people favor them, but every time our elected representatives either do nothing or fall short. Even the latest bipartisan gun control legislation is woefully inadequate. Somewhere someone decided a few extra campaign contributions and the myth of individual 2nd amendment rights and “freedom” were worth the carnage.

This is casual and callous cruelty and I’ve learned to live with it. Mostly it’s because I feel powerless to stop it, but nonetheless, it’s become woven into the fabric of my universe.

***

Recently I was reading an article about how Amazon actually encourages turnover. Bezos sees an entrenched hourly workforce as the road to mediocrity. It’s best to hire a crew, work them like robots, then discard them like depleted batteries a la The Matrix. Cynically planned human obsolescence. Casual cruelty. I’m sure Bezos wouldn’t describe it that way if I asked him about it; he’d probably lecture me about my lack of understanding of modern economics.

Bezos also apparently believes that algorithms and artificial intelligence are more efficient than flesh and blood humans when it comes to tracking worker progress. He conveniently forgets those same inefficient humans write the code that generates those algorithms and unconsciously weave their biases into their work. He touts his approach as innovative, but I just see it as cynical. It’s also a convenient way to emotionally distance himself from the cruelty such a system implies.

Because when you think about it, there is little qualitative difference between viewing your hourly employees as computer controlled robots, and Thomas Jefferson listing the children of his slaves in his business ledgers as “increase”, although my first instinct is to judge Jefferson more harshly and I’m not sure why.

Is American late stage capitalism any less cruel and barbaric than the worlds depicted in The Underground Railroad or The Handmaid’s Tale? Do antebellum America and the fictional world of Gilead disgust me more because I see the cruelty as more bloody and primitive? 150 years from now (assuming we are still here) when someone binges a dystopian miniseries inspired by the United States in the early 21st century, will they have to keep hitting pause every 15 minutes so they can take a breather? Will they ask, How could they live like that without their hearts exploding? How could they abide such casual cruelty?

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