What’s going on?
So yesterday a friend said to me, “You haven’t been updating in a while.” I know, I feel bad about that, I’m sorry everyone. Apart from actually writing, and I mean writing a lot, I’ve also just been off my game. Ran most of the Summer, ran most of the last two years injured, but I’m finally starting to come out of that, then I have to work on my conditioning and get the miles back up. Changing shoes was a nightmare overall, but I’m glad I stuck by my guns and told New Balance to shove it with their support of someone who is just disgusting.
I was going to run today, but a lightning storm this morning preempted that. As we know, I just don’t run in lightning, and nobody should. I know some of you do, and I beg you not to, there’s no point, it is just needlessly endangering yourself. If you can hear thunder, if you can see lightning, you are close enough to be in danger. I did run yesterday, slowly getting back to it after so much intermittent training.
On top of the injury, there’s just been the constant injury of this disgusting joke of a government in the United States, and in Italy. I had to have a conversation with my mother the other day about what vaccines I recieved as a child, in case there’s an outbreak of something here in Italy, I know if I’m safe or not. The only vaccine of the really important ones I think I haven’t had would be the BCG vaccine for TB. Which I may talk to a doctor about at this point, because shit. The Italian government now doesn’t require vaccines for school children! Are you fucking kidding me?
So while the Italian government is fucking over immigrants and killing or otherwise irreparably harming children with ridiculous policies, they’re doing nothing to actually fix any of the real problems Italy faces.
A friend of mine and I were just talking about the horrible inefficiency of the Italian Postal Service or Poste Italiane. I sent my ballot back to the US for the November elections, it’s been 10 days, I have not even seen the tracking number call up as being put into the system on the Poste website. That’s €8,40 worth of postage, and 10 days and as far as I know the letter, it’s just a plain letter envelope and two pieces of paper, has not moved from the location which I left it, having paid my postage.
It seems like a silly thing, but this is a basic need for a civilization, to be able to securely send things over distance and trust it will arrive. It’s why in the US they put the Post Office in the Constitution, it’s that important. If you can’t get something this basic right, how are you going to manage anything else. Americans who complain about the USPS have no idea how good that system is, and how good they really have it, they’ve never dealt with international post offices.
Other things the Italian government could focus on that would actually help, corruption. The company that runs the Bari Nord trains, the one that had that horrible accident two years ago where 23 people died, they’re “under investigation” but still that track where the accident occured, it’s closed. It has been closed for two years. The people are suffering, there’s no indication it will be fixed anytime soon. This idea that private industry somehow works better when it comes to stuff like this is just ridiculous. All it does is encourage corruption, and just doing the bare minimum in the name of profits.
Get rid of all this corrupt nonsense maybe? Nationalize the railroads, get everything up to speed, working again, expand the lines so you don’t have to take a bus anywhere south of Lecce. There are very few train tracks going through Puglia, a tourism hotspot, and they make it damned near impossible to get around! It’s insane. They’re throwing money out the window by not modernizing the infrastructure. Why, beacuse the corrupt business owners just pocket as much of the money for improvements as they can.
Maybe instead of decrying immigration they could change the racist policies in place meant to harm the immigrants, or the policies which create the immigrants in the first place by shitting over their homeland and propping up figurehead leaders that allow the West to strip their lands of all the wealth, leaving the people nothing but to either move or starve.
Then there’s the bullshit in the US, and how the people haven’t literally taken over the floor of the Senate to stop them from doing anything is beyond me! What will it take for the people around the world to finally have enough and decide to just shut this whole thing down until we can sort out everyone’s bullshit? If the people who should know better and represent us, and good sense aren’t, then we need to stop them. Just like this whole “Amazon will pay $15/hr” thing. But then he’s going to take the middle manager and supervisor bonuses away. Bezos is literally the richest man in the world, and he can more than afford to pay people a living wage, and still give the bonuses. This is just bullshit, he’s fucking bullshit.
But this is the way the world works, they’ll tell you to hate that you have to pay taxes, but they don’t show you how much money your labor really makes, and how much the owners take from YOUR value. They’re taking way more than the lion’s share of the value of your labor, giving you a pittance, and then telling you the reason you don’t get paid more is because taxes are too high? The hell they are, the average CEO in the US is making $318 for every $1 the average worker is making. Taxes aren’t your problem! The fundamentals people, organize, get your shit together, get out there and fight for just some basic decency! Demand decency! From that orange sack of flesh in the White House, to the CEO of your company, from everywhere, DECENCY should be the rallying cry and we needed to get this all together yesterday!
Have fun, keep running, and remember; if Gil can run then so can you!
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