in our own back yard

Sitting at my kitchen table again, sipping my first cup of coffee, this time I'm reading about Circuit City dumping its highest paid employees. Highest paid? Oh, about $15/hour is what I'm hearing. In general, that amounts to $30,000 a year. That's not bad, unless you want to buy a house, or raise a family, or even afford an apartment. As I understand it, the newly fired folks will be able to reapply for their jobs again after ten weeks, and at a lower pay, about $10/hour.

A bit later, sipping my second cup of coffee, I mused on terrorism. It may just be me, but loss of income is terrifying, much more so than car bombs and…well, whatever else our esteemed leaders want us to think is threatening us. Circuit City is based in Richmond, Virginia, so maybe that means one of the terrorists organizations we need to fear is right in our back yard.

But wait. Is it terrorism if there are laws written to protect activities that nevertheless threaten and terrorize law abiding citizens here? Oh, what a dilemma.

It would be so easy to fight the legalized terrorism in our back yard, and it wouldn't even be violent, nor would it be expensive. In the case of Circuit City, all we need to do is boycott them. That's all. Shop elsewhere. Or, if we're really brave, we simply won't shop at all. And, if they say we're hurting the economy, or tempting them to lay off more of our brothers and sisters, well, if we wanted to, we could take care of our own and bring a terrorist organization to its knees, all without bloodshed. What a concept.

According to what I'm reading, the newly fired employees were making at least 51 cents an hour above a pay range acceptable to the company. If they laid off 3,400 employees across the country, it shouldn't be too hard to figure out just how much these highly paid workers were costing the company, and it should be even easier to compare that figure with however much the CEO of Circuit City makes yearly. Would you like to take a guess at how those figures compare?

Sure. I think terrorism is a real thing. I suspect there really are "terrorists" who hate the United States and are figuring out ways to blow themselves up over here on our soil. But it seems to me we're blowing ourselves up in slow motion every time we cluck in passive dismay over some stranger's job loss. Kinda makes you wonder who else hates the United States, or at least hates the patriotic citizens here.

Hate? Did I say they hate us? Nah, they don't hate us any more than herd animals are hated. Herd animals are tolerated, even cared for, as long as they're giving their owners fresh meat, or blood, or toil.

p.s. After posting this, I discovered that the yearly income by the Circuit City CEO was posted by The Washington Post, but not by The Columbus Dispatch, my own local newspaper of a certain conservative bent. How interesting.