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A Boring Dystopia - Blog Posts
On an August afternoon, Pablo stared down at a foam plate sloshing with flavorless pinto beans and a particularly bad version of huevos a la Mexicana. The simple, usually delicious scramble of eggs, tomatoes, onions and jalapeños is difficult to mess up. But if anyone can find a way to make it unpalatable, it’s the cook at his labor camp. Soupy eggs are the last thing the 42-year-old from western Mexico wants to eat. But after a 12-hour day harvesting tobacco in the brutal and sometimes deadly summer heat, he must eat – and this was far from the worst meal he’s been given. A few weeks ago, fellow farm workers got sick due to raw and moldy food they were forced to purchase. On days like this, Pablo can’t decide which is worse: that he’s forced to pay $80 a week for this slop, or that everything about what he eats, when he eats and how much he eats is tightly controlled by his employer. Pablo, who is using a pseudonym due to fear of retaliation, is one of more than 35,000 migrant workers in North Carolina this year as part of the H-2A Temporary Agricultural Worker Program, a guest visa program overseen by the US Department of Labor (DoL). The program enables American employers to hire foreign workers to perform seasonal agricultural work. Employers in the program frequently exploit their migrant employees, and the structure of the program makes easy work of it. Visas are tied to a single employer who must also provide housing, transportation and access to food, creating a crushing power imbalance between American employers and migrant H-2A workers.
What if real life is the Eldritch Apocalypse, and we have all but forgotten earlier times, before The Planets Aligned, before we discovered Things Humanity Should Not Know, Dug Too Deep, and ruined our world by making it... this?
What if the true Eldritch Horror is... normativity? Conformity? Regimentation? Dullness of mind and experience?
What if we could remember what "whelming" felt like, or when cars still needed to be quarzyk-tested? What if squirrels reminded us of those times, because even though they used to also come in some of the colors that are now missing, they're pretty much the same, otherwise?
This Spring, I reserved a room online, at a Best Western motel, and received a pop-up message that said, "Thank you for submitting."
My apologies for not getting a screenshot.
My local library has thrown away its reference section. "That stuff is all online, now."
They have thrown away most of their archive. What remains is buried in the basement under junk, and all record of its contents is lost. They have no interest in doing anything with it.
For job hunting tips, we direct you to the three biggest job hunting websites.
Homework help and tutoring comes from a local NGO, when they can afford it, although they do use our building.
We do finally have crafts, though! We turned the quiet room and the young adult reading area into a luxurious crafting station.
Legal aid isn't available. We can refer you to a local lawyer, or that local NGO. But you can look up documents online, and print them for free!
I tried to provide compassionate human connection when I worked there, but that's one of the reasons I was let go. Apparently that's something patrons are supposed to provide each other.
And we still have books! We have more and more books about fewer and fewer things, and soon we will have more fiction than ever, we just have to get rid of all the useless nonfiction that's not about hobbies, home renovation, cooking, or poetry. Nobody ever reads those books, they're just taking up space we could use for James Patterson novels!
Truly, there's no better time to visit your local library.
