Prey

Years ago, my kids graduated from hamsters to a rabbit. Lucy Bun – named after Lucille Ball because she was a ginger rabbit – was so sweet. For a while, she was a free-range rabbit, until she chewed a few charger cords (Macbook chargers are EXPENSIVE) and the lower spines of the Oxford English Dictionary.

I began to put a little harness on her, attached to a long leash that clipped onto the clothesline. She could have outdoor time – so much outdoor time. But mostly, she hung out under the stairs that led to the aboveground pool. She was quite content there – nibbling grass and dandelions, hanging out in the shade. It was her favorite place.

I took her to the vet – he was great; he was the Staten Island Zoo vet – for a checkup and to schedule a spaying appointment. And I asked about exercise. He looked up at me – already thinking I was lavishing too much on spaying a bunny, because that was $600 in 2012 – and said, “We don’t know what the right amount of exercise is for a rabbit. They’re prey.” Grown for eating and fur. They’d never measured good health for an animal that was prey.

This job market is a whole thing. I’ve been through 4 recessions – the 1970s, waiting in gas lines in the back of a very hot station wagon; early 1990s, precipitated by the 1987 stock crash and not at all helped by Bush the First; 2008, which I weirdly survived just fine; and COVID – again, weirdly survived.

Now we’re in a different one. I don’t know if it will even be formally declared, because autocracy and oligarchy. What makes this different is the rise of AI.

I’ve talked about this before. But it gets worse.

Recently, I’ve seen an email sent to one of my dearest family members who is also looking for work. It fucking looked real – I’m pretty good at sussing this stuff out. I checked the HTML code – everything looked legit until I zoomed in on the actual email address of the sender. The domain went nowhere.

Honestly, the email was SO convincing. “They had me in the first half,” and all of that. Once I realized what was going on, I was SO PISSED.

Nobody likes to be fooled. Nobody likes for their loved ones to be drawn in by false optimism. And I hated delivering the news. My contempt for this approach could wither houseplants.

It’s the same old scam. Hold out hope to the desperate. I’m not sure what the endgame of all of this is – it wasn’t obvious from the email – but be sure there is an endgame. And it involves extracting money from the already-scared. The already-hopeless. The already-beaten-down.

That’s the economy we’re in right now. The scams are going to increase. This is the economy that oligarchy lives for – patsies. Marks. Prey. And we’re the targets – working people. Because people who need to work are chumps. We don’t have our own money. We haven’t inherited fortunes or made billions off the backs of exploited workers.

And chumps are to be mocked. And beaten down. And exploited.

But we’re not rabbits. We don’t have to be exploited – we have our own brain trusts, our communities, our friends, our loved ones – as usual, agape will win. Oligarchy doesn’t understand agape. Oligarchy doesn’t understand that no matter what, even if they suck up all our resources like a vacuum going into the couch cushions, we love one another.

Dahoo Dores. Oligarchs don’t understand love. Their relationships are transactional – give me this and I’ll give you that.

Love – real love – is infinite. It’s not about what you can get from a person or a job or a situation. It’s not about who loves who more. Love is bottomless, it’s endless, and it encompasses all the people, all the children, all the friends that you have. Love means that even if you love this person, it doesn’t mean you don’t love that person.

And with that love – that concern for our fellow human beings – we will get through this. Share the scams! Talk about the enshittification of everything due to AI intrusion! Protest, boycott, protest again! The ultimate way of defeating these people who want to divide and conquer us is to refuse – to stay banded together, because we’re all humans under the sun and no man is an island.