This week, week two of the remake in America, the focus has shifted to cleaning house, the purging of the deep state and of bloated or unproductive government personnel. I won’t belabor this with explanations, it’s more of a statement. The Musk team went to work. High officials that weaponized government to get Trump and his people – just to put in bluntly – these are the first priority of course, but after that comes all the people involved in DEI, transing, aiding and funding a huge number of orgs dedicated to hating America. After that comes incompetence, double dipping, outright fraud. Lastly, there is redundancy, and a huge number of functions that the government has no business doing to begin with.
One could feel for these people. Imagine you have a nice life in some suburb of Washington DC, a nice home and a big mortgage. You have two car payments, the girls have ballet on Wednesday and gymnastics on Saturday morning. The boy is in scouts. You go to church on Sunday. Unfortunately, the Mrs. manages grant funding for programs that advances underserved minorities in some far-flung sector, we’ll just say higher education. The Mr. works at the DHS, middle management. He takes directives from higher ups and delivers them to field managers and tracks them on some SAS program. These are just made up typical govie roles, not necessarily the most ideologically toxic, but they are indicative of what has become a greatly bloated bureaucracy. On Friday the Mrs. Got her papers. Her function is gone – zip – disappeared, no longer exists. There will be severance and when that’s gone, nothing. The Mr. just got told informally, awaiting the real notification, that he can relocate to Yuma, Arizona or also take a severance buyout. Life as they have known it is abruptly gone. They’ve both built a life here in outer DC, in fact the Mrs. has always lived here, and both her parents were civil servants for their whole career. ‘Service runs in the family’, they always have said. They both have received government paychecks since shortly after college, about the same time the oldest came along. They are now angry beyond words. They both voted for Harris and were convinced she would win. Their life is collapsing around them. Should we pity them? Should we be filled with anger along with them?
I have some images burned in my mind, pictures of the simple people of western North Carolina, living in campers on a muddy road. They’ve been homeless since the floods last fall. Until about ten days ago, they had no prospects of relief other than a hope and promise that help was coming, which it did. Our Mr. and Mrs. in this story did not share their lost hope, there anger, their despair back in October or at any time since then. They vaguely remember news stories of mine workers, oil rig workers, shale field workers, pipeline workers, truck drivers, waitresses, all these people in Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, North Dakota, spots all up and down the map, so many of them displaced as soon as Joe Biden took office. They didn’t feel for them either. They were an abstraction, a number, a statistic, not even worth an image in the Washington Post. Many of them worked in ‘evil’ industries anyway. They should have known better, seen the handwriting on the wall. The future was green. Maybe they could code. How could they be so stupid not to just move on sooner? Everybody could see that coming a mile away…
You may be sitting here, reading these words and think, ‘what an ass, thinks he can just make up a tale and guilt trip all the hardworking people that makes sure government works for everybody. It’s way too easy to talk that kind of shit when you’ve never experienced what it’s like to lose your whole way of life’. But I have.
You may remember the great recession of 2008 caused by the collapse of the housing and mortgage industries that ripped through the whole economy. Happy bankers, speculators, and yes some in government too, made a killing off their excesses until the whole deck collapsed. I was there, I was in it, I lost just about everything. No, I didn’t speculate. I just had a construction company at the time. I did ok at first but eventually, as the whole sector froze up, revenue dropped > 90%, and that was that. I don’t know how many companies can successfully negotiate that climate; I didn’t. I lost everything except small personal belongings, a car, and some modest retirement funds; everything else gone. By God’s grace, I found a way back, down a different path. My own story is not the point here except to say, I’ve been where some govies are going to have to go this coming week, in fact, probably in a worse place than what many will encounter. Many of them have their degrees already, I didn’t at the time. Many of them are younger, a huge advantage, at least for re-employment.
Still, should a govie be pitied at least? Maybe it doesn’t cost anything to want, give, or receive pity, but I will say, I never received any, at least outwardly. While I knew my parents and adult children cared for me through that time, otherwise, I don’t recall ever receiving a single word of care much less pity through that entire chapter. Not from extended family, not from friends, associates, or acquaintances; not one word.
So I say this to any former govie going through a hard time; if you were and are an honest hard working civil servant, keep your chin up, you’ll make it through, there is life on the other side. If on the other hand, you were lazy, wasteful, dishonest, fraudulent, or if you worked in DEI or promoted any other of the horseshit excesses of woke government; or if you were a hateful deep stater, hated Trump and believed it was your place to ‘save democracy’ by killing a democratic process, I’ll just say, ‘ you worked in an ‘evil’ industry anyway. You should have known better, seen the handwriting on the wall. The future was not green, or blue, or communist red for that matter. Maybe you can code. How could you have been so stupid not to just move on sooner? Everybody could see this coming a mile away.
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