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mostlysignssomeportents · 6 months ago

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The new globalism is global labor

For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

Depending on how you look at it, I either grew up in the periphery of the labor movement, or atop it, or surrounded by it. For a kid, labor issues don't really hold a lot of urgency – in places with mature labor movements, kids don't really have jobs, and the part-time jobs I had as a kid (paper route, cleaning a dance studio) were pretty benign.

Ironically, one of the reasons that labor issues barely registered for me as a kid was that my parents were in great, strong unions: Ontario teachers' unions, which protected teachers from exploitative working conditions and from retaliation when they advocated for their students, striking for better schools as well as better working conditions.

Ontario teachers' unions were strong enough that they could take the lead on workplace organization, to the benefit of teachers at every part of their careers, as well as students and the system as a whole. Back in the early 1980s, Ontario schools faced a demographic crisis. After years of declining enrollment, the number of students entering the system was rapidly increasing.

That meant that each level of the system – primary, junior, secondary – was about to go through a whipsaw, in which low numbers of students would be followed by large numbers. For a unionized education workforce, this presented a crisis: normally, a severe contraction in student numbers would trigger layoffs, on a last-in, first-out basis. That meant that layoffs loomed for junior teachers, who would almost certainly end up retraining for another career. When student numbers picked up again, those teachers wouldn't be in the workforce anymore, and worse, a lot of the senior teachers who got priority during layoffs would be retiring, magnifying the crisis.

The teachers' unions were strong, and they cared about students and teachers, both those at the start of their careers and those who'd given many years of service. They came up with an amazing solution: "self-funded sabbaticals." Teachers with a set number of years of seniority could choose to take four years at 80% salary, and get a fifth year off at 80% salary (actually, they could take their year off any time from the third year on).

This allowed Ontario to increase its workforce by about 20%, for free. Senior teachers got a year off to spend with their families, or on continuing education, or for travel. Junior teachers' jobs were protected. Students coming into the system had adequate classroom staff, in a mix of both senior and junior teachers.

This worked great for everyone, including my family. My parents both took their four-over-five year in 1983/84. They rented out our house for six months, charging enough to cover the mortgage. We flew to London, took a ferry to France, and leased a little sedan. For the next six months, we drove around Europe, visiting fourteen countries while my parents homeschooled us on the long highway stretches and in laundromats. We stayed in youth hostels and took a train to Leningrad to visit my family there. We saw Christmas Midnight Mass at the Vatican and walked around the Parthenon. We saw Guernica at the Prado. We visited a computer lab in Paris and I learned to program Logo in French. We hung out with my parents' teacher pals who were civilian educators at a Canadian Forces Base in Baden-Baden. I bought an amazing hand-carved chess set in Seville with medieval motifs that sung to my D&D playing heart. It was amazing.

No, really, it was amazing. Unions and the social contract they bargained for transformed my family's life chances. My dad came to Canada as a refugee, the son of a teen mother who'd been deeply traumatized by her civil defense service as a child during the Siege of Leningrad. My mother was the eldest child of a man who, at thirteen, had dropped out of school to support his nine brothers and sisters after the death of his father. My parents grew up to not only own a home, but to be able to take their sons on a latter-day version of the Grand Tour that was once the exclusive province of weak-chinned toffs from the uppermost of crusts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour

My parents were active in labor causes and in their unions, of course, but that was just part of their activist lives. My mother was a leader in the fight for legal abortion rights in Canada:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/8882641733

My dad was active in party politics with the New Democratic Party, and both he and my mother were deeply involved with the fight against nuclear arms proliferation, a major issue in Canada, given our role in supplying radioisotopes to the US, building key components for ICBMs, testing cruise missiles over Labrador, and our participation in NORAD.

Abortion rights and nuclear arms proliferation were my own entry into political activism. When I was 13, I organized a large contingent from my school to march on Queen's Park, the seat of the Provincial Parliament, to demand an end to Ontario's active and critical participation in the hastening of global nuclear conflagration:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/53616011737/

When I got a little older, I started helping with clinic defense and counterprotests at the Morgentaler Clinic and other sites in Toronto that provided safe access to women's health, including abortions:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/morgentaler-honoured-by-order-of-canada-federal-government-not-involved-1.716775

My teens were a period of deepening involvement in politics. It was hard work, but rewarding and fundamentally hopeful. There, in the shadow of imminent nuclear armageddon, there was a role for me to play, a way to be more than a passive passenger on a runaway train, to participate in the effort to pull the brake lever before we ran over the cliff.

In hindsight, though, I can see that even as my activism intensified, it also got harder. We struggled more to find places to meet, to find phones and computers to use, to find people who could explain how to get a permit for a demonstration or to get legal assistance for comrades in jail after a civil disobedience action.

What I couldn't see at the time was that all of this was provided by organized labor. The labor movement had the halls, the photocopiers, the lawyers, the experience – the infrastructure. Even for campaigns that were directly about labor rights – campaigns for abortion rights, or against nuclear annihilation – the labor movement was the material, tangible base for our activities.

Look, riding a bicycle around all night wheatpasting posters to telephone poles to turn out people for an upcoming demonstration is hard work, but it's much harder if you have to pay for xeroxing at Kinko's rather than getting it for free at the union hall. Worse, the demonstration turnout suffers more because the union phone-trees and newsletters stop bringing out the numbers they once brought out.

This was why the neoliberal project took such savage aim at labor: they understood that a strong labor movement was foundation of antiimperialist, antiracist, antisexist struggles for justice. By dismantling labor, the ruling class kicked the legs out from under all the other fights that mattered.

Every year, it got harder to fight for any kind of better world. We activist kids grew to our twenties and foundered, spending precious hours searching for a room to hold a meeting, leaving us with fewer hours to spend organizing the thing we were meeting for. But gradually, we rebuilt. We started to stand up our own fragile, brittle, nascent structures that stood in for the mature and solid labor foundation that we'd grown up with.

The first time I got an inkling of what was going on came in 1999, with the Battle of Seattle: the mass protests over the WTO. Yes, labor turned out in force for those mass demonstrations, but they weren't its leaders. The militancy, the leadership, and the organization came out of groups that could loosely be called "post-labor" – not in the sense that they no longer believed in labor causes, but in the sense that they were being organized outside of traditional labor.

Labor was in retreat. Five years earlier, organized labor had responded to NAFTA by organizing against Mexican workers, rather than the bosses who wanted to ship jobs to Mexico. It wasn't unusual to see cars in Ontario with CAW bumper stickers alongside xenophobic stickers taking aim at Mexicans, not bosses. Those were the only workers that organized labor saw as competitors for labor rights: this was also the heyday of "two-tier" contracts, which protected benefits for senior workers while leaving their junior comrades exposed to bosses' most sadistic practices, while still expecting junior workers to pay dues to a union that wouldn't protect them:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/25/strikesgiving/#shed-a-tier

Two-tier contracts were the opposite of the solidarity that my parents' teachers' union exhibited in the early 1980s; blaming Mexican workers for automakers' offshoring was the opposite of the solidarity that built transracial and international labor power in the early days of the union movement:

https://unionhall.aflcio.org/bloomington-normal-trades-and-labor-assembly/labor-culture/edge-anarchy-first-class-pullman-strike

As labor withered under a sustained, multi-decades-long assault on workers' rights, other movements started to recapitulate the evolution of early labor, shoring up fragile movements that lacked legal protections, weathering setbacks, and building a "progressive" coalition that encompassed numerous issues. And then that movement started to support a new wave of labor organizing, situating labor issues on a continuum of justice questions, from race to gender to predatory college lending.

Young workers from every sector joined ossified unions with corrupt, sellout leaders and helped engineer their ouster, turning these dying old unions into engines of successful labor militancy:

https://theintercept.com/2023/04/07/deconstructed-union-dhl-teamsters-uaw/

In other words, we're in the midst of a reversal of the historic role of labor and other social justice movements. Whereas once labor anchored a large collection of smaller, less unified social movements; today those social movements are helping bring back a weakened and fragmented labor movement.

One of the key organizing questions for today is whether these two movements can continue to co-evolve and, eventually, merge. For example: there can be no successful climate action without climate justice. The least paid workers in America are also the most racially disfavored. The gender pay-gap exists in all labor markets. For labor, integrating social justice questions isn't just morally sound, it's also tactically necessary.

One thing such a fusion can produce is a truly international labor movement. Today, social justice movements are transnational: the successful Irish campaign for abortion rights was closely linked to key abortion rights struggles in Argentina and Poland, and today, abortion rights organizers from all over the world are involved in mailing medication abortion pills to America.

A global labor movement is necessary, and not just to defeat the divide-and-rule tactics of the NAFTA fight. The WTO's legacy is a firmly global capitalism: workers all over the world are fighting the same corporations. The strong unions of one country are threatened by weak labor in other countries where their key corporations seek to shift manufacturing or service delivery. But those same strong unions are able to use their power to help their comrades abroad protect their labor rights, depriving their common adversary of an easily exploited workforce.

A key recent example is Mercedes, part of the Daimler global octopus. Mercedes' home turf is Germany, which boasts some of the strongest autoworker unions in the world. In the USA, Mercedes – like other German auto giants – preferentially manufactures its cars in the South, America's "onshore-offshore" crime havens, where labor laws are both virtually nonexistent and largely unenforced. This allows Mercedes to exploit and endanger a largely Black workforce in a "right to work" territory where unions are nearly impossible to form and sustain.

Mercedes just defeated a hard-fought union drive in Vance, Alabama. In part, this was due to admitted tactical blunders from the UAW, who have recently racked up unprecedented victories in Tennessee and North Carolina:

https://paydayreport.com/uaw-admits-digital-heavy-organizing-committee-light-approach-failed-them-in-alabama-at-mercedes/

But mostly, this was because Mercedes cheated. They flagrantly violated labor law to sabotage the union vote. That's where it gets interesting. German workers have successfully lobbied the German parliament for the Supply Chain Act, an anticorruption law that punishes German companies that violate labor law abroad. That means that even though the UAW just lost their election, they might inflict some serious pain on Mercedes, who face a fine of 2% of their global annual revenue, and a ban on selling cars to the German government:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/10/an-injury-to-one/#is-an-injury-to-all

This is another way reversal of the post-neoliberal era. Whereas once the US exported its most rapacious corporate practices all over the world, today, global labor stands a chance of exporting workers' rights from weak territories to strong ones.

Here's an American analogy: the US's two most populous states are California and Texas. The policies of these states ripple out over the whole country, and even beyond. When Texas requires textbooks that ban evolution, every pupil in the country is at risk of getting a textbook that embraces Young Earth Creationism. When California enacts strict emission standards, every car in the country gets cleaner tailpipes. The WTO was a Texas-style export: a race to the bottom, all around the world. The moment we're living through now, as global social movements fuse with global labor, are a California-style export, a race to the top.

This is a weird upside to global monopoly capitalism. It's how antitrust regulators all over the world are taking on corporations whose power rivals global superpowers like the USA and China: because they're all fighting the same corporations, they can share tactics and even recycle evidence from one-another's antitrust cases:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/05/big-tech-eu-drop-dead

Look, the UAW messed up in Alabama. A successful union vote is won before the first ballot is cast. If your ground game isn't strong enough to know the outcome of the vote before the ballot box opens, you need more organizing, not a vote:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/23/a-collective-bargain/

But thanks to global labor – and its enemy, global capitalism – the UAW gets another chance. Global capitalism is rich and powerful, but it has key weaknesses. Its drive to "efficiency" makes it terribly vulnerable, and a disruption anywhere in its supply chain can bring the whole global empire to its knees:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/21/eight-and-skate/#strike-to-rule

American workers – especially swing-state workers who swung for Trump and are leaning his way again – overwhelmingly support a pro-labor agenda. They are furious over "price gouging and outrageous corporate profits…wealthy corporate CEOs and billionaires [not] paying what they should in taxes and the top 1% gaming the system":

https://www.americanfamilyvoices.org/_files/ugd/d4d64f_6c3dff0c3da74098b07ed3f086705af2.pdf

They support universal healthcare, and value Medicare and Social Security, and trust the Democrats to manage both better than Republicans will. They support "abortion rights, affordable child care, and even forgiving student loans":

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-05-20-bidens-working-class-slump/

The problem is that these blue-collar voters are atomized. They no longer meet in union halls – they belong to gun clubs affiliated with the NRA. There are enough people who are a) undecided and b) union members in these swing states to defeat Trump. This is why labor power matters, and why a fusion of American labor and social justice movements matters – and why an international fusion of a labor-social justice coalition is our best hope for a habitable planet and a decent lives for our families.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/20/a-common-foe/#the-multinational-playbook

#pluralistic #mercedes #germany #trustbusting #apple #eu #south korea #japan #uk #competition and markets authority #dma #dsa #germany supply chain act #alabama #bafa

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forsoobado137 · 4 months ago

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I've been wondering how nations have money. Do they get paid by their bosses? How much do they make monthly or annually? Is it just what the average person makes in their countries? Do they pay rent and mortgages, or have they already been paid off because they're immortal? How do they afford their luxuries and travel expenses? Are they insured? Are they in a lot of debt? If the government buys all of their things, can they be taken away as punishment?

Or maybe they have other part time jobs? Spain does run a café in the anime. And I think he sells merch for that too. I'm not too sure because wouldn't it be a bad look for the gov if the NP of the United States was making minimum wage at McDonald's?

Maybe they do appearance work to make money. Imagine France or Italy on the front covers of fashion magazines. France probably would make a fuckton as a model. And I'm pretty sure there was one strip where America was in a hair commercial.

#hetalia #hetalia headcanons #aph america #hws america #alfred f jones #aph france #hws france #francis bonnefoy #aph spain #hws spain #antonio fernandez carriedo #aph italy #hws italy #feliciano vargas #I like the idea of them being fancy and rich #But I also like the idea of them being more rich in assets than in cash #Except Netherlands #He's just rich #And his siblings

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therealslimshakespeare · 7 months ago

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MotA Fanfiction: John Brady and first person/reader/insert no use of y/n.

18+: John Brady had me at “like you told me” five seconds before “son of a bitch that’s France” and now we’ve got seven kids and a mortgage. The following could be a very existential diary page about the first few months of that marriage.

But basically, John Brady makes me rabid: here have some purple prose smut about it mixed into an essay on happiness

My mother readied me for many things but not for this. I dig through the archives of her heavy advice, her off handed comments, her jubilant prognostications, all I keep so dutifully in my mind, and I search for some hint from her that she knew it could be like this. But I find nothing, it is all too weak or strong or wordy.

Did it not come in words?

Were her misty eyes when she settled the veil over my face the true meaning of it? Had I mistaken her emotion as a presentment of missing me when it was instead tremulous excitement for what was in store? Had she known when she wrapped me in white and insisted it fit me lovingly to my proportions that it was not tidiness and appreciation for good seams but instead, that holy knowledge of what more awaited me? That a wedding dress in its fit reflects what happens when the groom removes it?

She knew I had myself a good man. Did she suspect how well he’d fit me?

And I thought it was merely cloth, I had been too busy even for my own wedding. I was too busy loving him, the idea of him, of him being mine. Perhaps if we had met in peacetime, if he had courted me between his hours at the office and my semesters I would have looked forward to my wedding, planned each detail and worried over all manner of things that brides are said to care about.

But we had not; I’d no sooner loved him than he’d gone, and no sooner had death returned him on loan than I married him. I loved him and everyone else but me seemed to know what that meant as he kissed frosting from my wrist.

I had thought I’d known at the registry office, signing in ink my name, scrawling a practiced B that ended with a flourished Y.

Mrs. Brady.

I’d thought I’d known then. I had given the benign judge a saucy smile of the fully enlightened. I had no idea. To ask me if I was happy that day would have been a good joke, to ask me if I could be happier when we waved out a window chalked with news of our nuptials: it would have been more than half insulting.

I was happy. I thought I knew. And that night, what little doubt I had about the gaps in my theory, he filled. Love in its rawest form, breaking me apart, making a place for himself, I clung to his shoulders; this part my mother had told me of. She told me it got better; I can’t speak to that. He was pushing and petting and I endured until surrender turned to fascination and again to arousal by his rhythm, the concrete sense of his need, the clarity of his release. And still I was urging my sweet boy to take and take; it did not get better, it got sublime. I could not fault my mother for her faulty preparations, even though I think she knew -for her own sake I hope she knew. There are no words for it when two bodies become one, minds meld and he finds his way eased by your blood till he’s in so deep you think he’s probed at your heart. I don’t hear of people speaking about that part, and mother didn’t tell me, but I think they know.

I am quite forgiving of her that night, I thought I knew then, I assumed what she left unsaid, it was merely out for lack of vocabulary. Lying beside him, having tasted heaven, I am generous. She tried. I know.

He had put a pillow under my hips before he opened me, it tilted me kindly for his invasion and I wonder who told him of that. His innate desire to please had long ago led me to find he was good at kissing, and that he liked to kiss me everywhere. He was as delighted by the back of my knees as he was by my throat, and he forgot all reason when he tasted between my thighs, only his firm and unyielding hands on my hips gave a mottled clue he kept at such kissing for his own satisfaction as much as mine.

I know that I am happy then, on my wedding night, and next morning I am happier still. I might try at being cross with my own self, for sabotaging my arrival at absolute knowledge except that I cannot help but be giddy for it; he loves to kiss me, my boy, and he has a warm blush on his face in the sunlight, this first morning I’ve woken up beside him, and his hands are already busy with me. Mine grow busy with him and I know this is how we will spend our days, kissing with him inside me, and I am happy.

No one who encounters me in the coming weeks can doubt it. My parents whisper amongst themselves, his too, church members and fellow servicemen. My Johnny is not settled with a job and so we lodge at various places in the next two months, and soon each of our hosts knows it, too. It cannot be stifled beneath his quieting palm when he breaks me apart, thin walls and no place to call our own except the harbor of my body, that’s his home and he goes into it. Often and more vigorously each time until I associate happiness with the most alarming strength of exertion from the lithe length of him rolling against mine, noses to toes; I draw blood from his hand.

Even my boy is beginning to see: he makes me happy. He has the most melancholy eyes, my boy, I recalled them as being calm and observant before he went away. But he has observed too much though he never says so, and out of his army greens there is not a speck of baby blue left in them, they��re cold gray and the only time I see them sparkle are when I’ve made him laugh so hard a tear rolls down his creased cheeks. I am impatient with his happiness, I know it and I know I’m wrong for it, but I miss the sky blue of them and the way I didn’t used to have to guess at what roils beneath them.

If he can’t feel happiness as thoroughly as me, he at least presents with quiet confidence as he finds a peacetime footing, there is a job offer in Maryland and we take our first road-trip. He is full of plans and maps and well drawn schedules and I am full of 55 mph breezes up the nose, feet in his lap and face hung out the window merrily, there are endless rows of pines and the feel of bark against my back at the rest pavilion. More, more, more, I demand of him and he gives it, it’s happiness turned hungry, greedy, close to vicious. Happiness that needs topping off.

We fight that night before his interview. A silly thing, inconsequential, hotel room adding to the displaced feeling I have begun to feel after our adventure calmed into adult necessity. He is preoccupied with being excellent and I am preoccupied with happiness. Chiefly if I make him happy or not; this is the first night he has not been so undivided in his passion and I allow it to vex me. I am young and I am happy and I guard it jealously, thinking that holding it -gripping him- tight fistedly desperate about it, will keep it all the closer.

“I am doing this for us.” his tone cuts me, I have admired it slashing others but it has never been directed at me before. He is wiser than I am and a self proclaimed cynic. I think he is fighting me in my happy quest, but, “For us, I’m doing this for us.”

His fingers dig into my cheeks and it is assurance enough. I have to agree that even heaven must have some maintenance work intruding on the celestial revels from time to time.

By the time I stand on the bed and cinch his tie the next morning before his interview, I have never been more in love. I am happy, yes, but there is admiration for him there too, but I struggle with finding a place for it.

Love, it seems, multiplies and I remain fixated with happiness in its tidiest form. Like the moment we cut the cake. I ask him that night if he has ever felt that, felt it simple and tidy.

“I feel a million things about you.” he swears instead; his tone suggests it is the most devout compliment.

I pray for wisdom next Sunday. I can feel that there is more to happiness than I know and it unsettles me. Our fight has long been made up but those million things that Johnny thinks and knows of me haunt the little life I try to construct, they haunt it as badly as whatever plagues his dreams at night.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” he begs a hundred times to me night after thrashing night; he suggests the sofa, I won’t hear of it. The bruises his flailing limbs land on mine are no darker than those he makes in calculated romance. His dreams respond to the feeling of my hands on his belly, he wakes easily with it, I have something to wake for and it is not perfect or quiet or even gentle always, but I am in love and when he allows me, I feel powerful and needed, hands on his belly, a thin tickle of hair beneath my palm. “You’re an Angel.” he swears to me, lips warm and plush against mine, I am so in love.

My cycle stops soon after the interview trip. I wait until I am sure to tell him one night, we are sprawled across our bed gasping back breath and I tell him, simple and direct as he prefers. I had wanted him one last time before he thought of me as a madonna. It had not been so different, I had been preoccupied with the child but I had also found my peak, and he had grasped greedily at my breasts, my nipples knotting beneath his fingers and only a lingering soreness in them to remind me of my secret. With his seed dripping from me, redundant and warm, I tell him.

“A baby?” My husband’s eyes glow, he cups my face like I am holy, his lips thank me with kisses to my nose and eyelids, “We’re havin’ a baby?”

He is all preparedness now. Striding with purpose and when he kisses me he is kissing the mother of his child; he gets the job in Maryland. We tell my parents of our happy news before we go, it surprises no one and yet there are celebrations as if we waited a decade. My Johnny is pleased and his smile is fixed, but I remember him when I told him, the glow about him, the naked press of him to me, his kisses on my belly. These are things I wish I could tell my mother -these are things that make me happier. Even more than the child itself.

On the way back to Maryland, our car trip is sedate, I eat ginger candies to quell the nausea and Johnny contemplates an unspoken thing. When I contemplate at all I think of driving down here over a month ago and the feeling of bark behind me and his hips snapping into me. I wonder if our child was made in the pines -how very different a few weeks makes a trip. He has foregone smoking his pipe indoors out of consideration for my queasy stomach.

“There’s somebody out here I should see.” He answers me at the gas pump, knowing I can tell he is preoccupied.

One of his crew lives off this exit, it’s why he’s filling up when the tank is half full. Johnny says he should go see him, and where he goes I will too.

Waist gunner Timmons is missing both legs. Together he and Johnny speak of bonds and education, his new job and the likelihood of drought, tidbits about the other boys' peacetime business failures, they laugh without malice. They laugh at themselves too. When taking our leave Johnny tells him our news. It makes me blush and I don’t know why, I was proud of our making the child. I should be proud of our finished product. I see him slip a hefty dollared bill in the coat pocket of the garden cover by the door as we leave.

Johnny stops our car at the end of the long gravel drive and while it confuses me, I know he is in a turmoil. His fists suddenly slam against the steering wheel and his face goes red beneath its freckles.

“Baby?” I question him but then he is weeping, forehead pressed to his knuckles on the steering wheel, aggravating buzz of a fly against the windshield unheeded.

It’s ugly and hiccuping and half panicked, he can’t seem to stop though the angry set of his shoulders tells me he wishes to, and after helpless fluttering beside him, I undo my waist belt and slide over to his side, arm thrown over his shoulders, forcefully prying him from the wheel. He lays in my arms and weeps for what feels like hours, letting me hold him and swear to him and soothe him. I’ve never known him like this, he speaks of Whys and Who’s and What’s He Got Going For Him to Deserve So Much Good Luck.

I am his good luck, his lips tell me as they press to my belly, he has fully sagged into my lap in his misery. I am his good luck, me and the baby and the job in Maryland and it is the first time I’ve ever thought of happiness as guilt.

The first days in Maryland, I cannot say that he is happier but he looks at me more openly, the guarded set of his eyes is gone and something sheepish but trusting shimmers there instead. Still steel gray but I notice the flutter of lashes around them and the dusting of pink cheeks more often. We never speak about Timmon’s driveway but I come to realize with a jolt: he’s softer for having let me see one of his million parts. I know him better now and it shows in his loosened shoulders and his shy smiles, the almost joyous eagerness he has to begin life here.

We close on an offer on a house, brick with a little porch, a small front drive and boxy lawn but in back there is a tall whitewashed fence going round and garden beds that are empty and waiting. It’s a prize and we are both delighted and he swoops me up, light as a feather, and brings me over the threshold.

“You’ve been waiting to do that!” I realize, he didn’t do it on our wedding night at the hotel or any of our other lodgings.

“We’ve got ourselves a home.” he grins back and there is such relief in his face I wonder at how much concern he was harboring before.

I begin to watch my man the way he watches me, I think less and less of whether he is happy and more and more if he feels safe. It’s why I’ve made no move to couple since he has not, not since I told him of the baby. We have been traveling, then moving in our boxes and he has been feeling whatever it was he felt in Timmons driveway. Some modicum of selflessness takes up residence in my childish heart, allowing him to hold me and not demanding proof of happiness from him. He cradles my belly every night as we spoon and I can feel his lips quirking in smiles as he gently hums to our child.

I watch my husband like he first watched me, from the bandstand, boyish cheeks blown full and nimble fingers flying over brass keys, I knew I wanted him then before he did. I went after him fast and furious, unlike myself in the way I tenaciously kept our first halting conversations going, shocking myself with the way I fanned my skirts around his lap and let him play beneath them -he was better at that than talking and I obliged him ravenously. Told him he looked handsome in his uniform and he told me he’d like to marry me. He came back to me as promised, four years late, yet the happiness that his first glittery eyed glance sparked in me is something I crave now as if I have not dabbled in far more heady pursuits with him thus far. His child grows in my belly but I miss his blush when I first stared at him past his bunker behind his music stand.

He watched me first, I wanted him worse. His eyes were blue then.

I admit my petulance to my mother after a week at the new house. Not that I am so wanton as to be bereft after a ten day abstinence, but that I cannot seem to settle some gnawing resentment that has begun. Again, not over the coupling. I am not sure what it’s over. I love him more than ever, and yet, that first blush of blazing white happiness of our first few days has given way to a nurturing watchfulness, an almost heartbreaking sympathy, a self effacing desire for his joy that robs me of my own. I ask her for a remedy.

She tells me I loved the idea of him before, and now I love him. And love is not made of happiness alone. She tells me to talk to him. “If you don’t know what it is,” she says, “he may. He knows you.”

He loves a thousand million parts of me, he had said. And then I had scoffed, feeling so sure I was comprised of only one: happiness.

Amongst the other basic necessities of settling in, we do our best to scope out the town, having arrived on a Thursday we attended mass soon in the only Catholic Church to be found in the small place, we find the town’s rec hall more promising, I keep my eyes peeled for a music store. There is one in Millersville, I find it when I go to inspect a couch that caught my eye in the Hutzlers catalog.

I do not know if he needs reeds. He hasn’t played since he got back, he may have a stack of extras in some box. But the sentimentality fills me strongly, the memory of missing him and waiting for him and having no ability to reach him over there except by sending the packages. And each of his letters with their little sheepish addendum: please send more reeds.

I got up from dinner that night to give them to him. He had asked about my day and as if I had some horrid secret to cover I had choked on my descriptions of the couch until I had broken down and admitted there was more. I place the item beside his plate and he puts down his fork while I stand in suspense.

An innocuous plastic wrapped package of saxophone reeds was probably not what my Johnny was expecting but he lets out a cut off little laugh about it.

“Did you even need more?” I am weirdly in knots over it, fingers nervously bunching at my dress and he leaves off opening the package to slip his own into mine to prevent the tick.

“I did.” he murmurs warmly, pressing a kiss to my forearm that dangles beside him, “Thank you.”

“Is that why you’re not playing?”

He looks surprised. “I -just busy, I suppose?” he questions himself.

“I miss it.” vocalized at last, I realize just how much.

“Do you?” his lips curve in a smile against my arm and move across to my belly, the hot gusts of his affection damping my dress. “Well, if my sweetheart misses it…” his lips have moved so low along my dress I feel an ache where I am missing other things.

He cleans his instrument that night while sat at the table while I do the dishes, our clearing of it a joint endeavor. He fusses over the need to grease it and other things too technical to be questioned but I understand, it won’t be played tonight. But it’s good to see him at the familiar task, his affection and seriousness for his work both manifesting across his face.

The next day he goes with me to Hutzlers, his opinion on household furnishings having been impeccable thus far and far more decisive than my own. He humors my myriad of hypotheticals regarding comfort and staining and color schemes, hands shoved easily in his pockets and a gentle smile on his face, I know by look alone he is categorizing each of my expert arguments into tidy little categories that he will present to me again in fifteen minutes time when a decision must be made.

In the end we purchase a pale blue couch with roses imprinted tone on tone into the fabric. It was decided upon only after he had hauled me down to the cushions to see if it were a plausibly good place to kiss. I now wonder if we have gotten a blue couch instead of a peach one simply due to the fact it was further from the window and he felt free to dip me down over the arm for a brief half minute.

Either way, it is set in stone that our new couch will be blue and on the way to the cash register, he immovably halts at a counter displaying the most heart wrenchingly cute baby items.

“We have to get somethin’.” he sounds almost exasperated at the previous weeks’ oversight.

We leave with ten different things, not having agreed upon what gender our child will be and I am unable to argue that booties are always a sensible option for either sex, I also want to strangle the woman behind the counter whose over eager desire to help robs me of the unguarded delight Johnny was showing over the little things before she came up.

He is opening my car door and teasing me for being so mercurial when he himself turns mildly glum before a hard determination sets his jaw.

“What?” I question, half wondering if he sees some old acquaintance or is having some awful recollection. I can’t imagine what amongst this urban place and departmental hedonism could inspire it but, stranger associations have done so.

“It’s midway through September.” he mutters, keen eyes fixed at the store’s grand facade, hand still heavy on the window before closing my door.

“Yep.” I am at a loss.

“But the seasons are milder down here.” he is presenting a case of his own for something and all I can do is agree, Maryland is more temperate than New York.

“Your mother even gave me a book about the different zones.”

“Yeah.” he is pleased with my perceived understanding, face lighting up, “So it’ll stay warmer down here.”

“For longer.”

“Yeah.”

“Johnny? What?”

He seems to realize I’ve not understood what he keeps looking at so intensely across the parking lot. “I want to buy bushes and flowers but it’s September.” he admits.

An extravagance this late in the season, and my man is not extravagant. “They’re very pretty.” I settle for acknowledging, knowing this is something he must decide but he looks so torn I would do anything to smooth that creased brow.

“It would make the place more, I dunno,” he stares down at his hand on the still adjar car door and shrugs, “…homey?”

“Some things are perennial.” a little blossom of hope tinges my own voice, my mind had gotten away with me -if he is this invested while yet undecided, I cannot imagine what diligence he might display at husbandry were he to act on it. And there’s nothing I have grown to love more in all my watching than him at some diligence.

We don’t get them. But in the car on the ride back there is discussion that the place is only a fifteen minute drive. Which pertains to the delivery of our couch, and we must hurry back to have the front door opened and I wanted to sweep where it will be once more. The delivery boys thump the blue thing on our floorboards carefully and its large presence is exactly what Johnny was saying we needed -Hominess. Emphatic. Settled. Ours.

No sooner have they left with his kind tips in their pockets than he is pulling me down on it, a hungry imitation of his actions at the store with hands more risky and insistent. I have been missing him so badly I come apart easily from his finger’s ministrations between my legs, sidetracked in trying to pull off my panties and garter belt. When he sees me go, he takes mercy and lets up, a gentle swiping through his prized currency of sticky pleasure and I watch him bring those long fingers to his lips, sucking them clean.

“You taste different.” he admits with heavy lidded eyes, “Since…” he doesn’t finish his explanation of the change in my belly, the slight swollen pooch that is our child.

“Bad?” I ask with feminine panic at the very notion.

He is settled on his belly between my thighs, blue couch a plush landing beneath us both, “N’bad.” is emphatically mumbled against me and my legs kick out the buzz of his voice. By his vocal and insistent enjoyment of it, I cannot help but be assured. Not bad. I keen up at our ceiling as he wrings one and then two and then -he won’t stop and I am needy for it, enjoying the familiar span of his hand dominating my belly, only this time it is cupping my swollen womb. I settle in relief that the proof of my maternity beneath his palm does not deter him, or at least, distract. He hums into his messy work and noses at me where I am all lightning and pulsing need, his hips jerking down into our plush new addition each time I pull at his dark locks.

Different, he says of my taste, and wedges his face in deeper, his hips beginning to move with the movements of his face against my parts and I swear to him that he is good, that he is perfect, that I’ve missed him, that he is beautiful and that he should have gotten those flowers.

His corresponding laugh makes me gush onto his tongue and his humor turns into a moan that only prolonges my delicious agony. He pushes my legs wider so forcefully I think he would like to take them off entirely if he could, his face smothered in my heat.

“You have a job now.” I present a case of my own to him, about the flowers as I try to get on top of the feeling, it is too much and he is unrelenting and I try to grasp onto something that is not his rocking body and clever lips, “A very good job and a car and -and we have this house, a-nd a-a a very nice couch -aaah God!”

His grip on my hips is deathly as I list his accomplishments until he seems to seize and then sag, tongue grown listless at last as his lips part and a shuddering groan fans over my tacky thigh.

“And we deserve flowers.” I whisper hoarsely, petting the dark strands from out of his eyes.

He’s spent himself in his writhing, I can tell by the molten expression on his face when his eyes finally drag up to meet mine over the small swell of my stomach, and set off by our new couch, they are the sparkliest of baby blues.

I have never been more startled. Or pleased. I had forgotten to watch for it, and so it had returned of its own skittish volition. I cling to that glimmer of blue until his smile grows wider and his eyes flutter shut in exhaustion.

Happiness.

At the end that night, bathed and fed and having inspected our new assortment of infant wear and argued once more over the likely gender, he brings his instrument out of its case with the package of reeds in hand. He has been offered a part time job at the high school, teaching music. It would be a hobby, he protests against his own interest in it, it would take away from time with me and Little One.

“I could go, too.” I point out.

“You’d like that?” he is pleased, the lamp is too dim for me to discern if there is blue but his lashes flutter briskly and I kiss his cheek, it’s hot beneath my lips.

“I always love watching you play.”

Before he fits the reed to the mouthpiece he makes me close my lips around it, a red stain marking it after, much to his satisfaction.

“You’ll be teaching children!” I swat at him, utterly pleased despite my own remonstrance.

“And I am married.” he says as if it were a universal absolution for all things.

The clock strikes five fifteen the next evening and he is not back. I have a plentiful assortment of excuses to choose from to explain his variance from routine. Traffic, work, a waylaying colleague -he has only been at work a couple of weeks, it is absurd to expect a forever unchanging home time. By five forty I cannot pretend expectation of what may have occurred and so keep the meatloaf warm with its proper cozy and when there is a bustle at the front door, I sprint to it like he’s back home from the war again.

It’s well I opened the door myself, he was endeavoring to while juggling three large potted plants in his arms. There is dirt in his white collar and I let out a little whoop at his uncharacteristic impulsiveness, stepping aside to help him get them through to the back porch. It doesn’t even need discussing, the large sliding glass door gives a beautiful view of the backyard from the living room and it’s sheltering insures privacy and a deterrent from our children’s stray balls flying to the next lot. At least for a few years. And the plants will go in the empty beds at the perimeter.

It is a Friday, and we eat my tepid meatloaf in between his smooching apologies for having been tardy and garbled plans for where we will put each plant and how we will stagger them according to their eventual size. It was far more than the three pots he brought, the trunk and also the cab were full of fauna.

Our excitement next morning is idiotic, we manage to snicker at ourselves for being so domesticated that this inspires frenzy but the self awareness gets not further than that, I throw on my rattiest -and coolest- sundress and he his jeans and with only his white singlet, breakfast is inhaled while standing at the backdoor, last minute plotting being discussed between bites. And then we spend our entire Saturday at it.

Johnny digs the holes and carries the plants to their allotted places and only then allows me to gently labor in filling soil over the roots, we eat cold meatloaf and slug down ice tea under the afternoon heat, not even bothering to go inside. When I have no other job, I weed the beds in preparation, watching unreservedly the way his shoulders glisten in his hard work. I have caught him eying the neckline of my dress, the recent changes he has imposed on my body now ensuring it does not gap so much as bulge while I lean over and grasp the next offending dandelion. I know he is watching and he knows I am watching and we are happy at our work, tidy garden beds filling out and his tongue pressed to his top lip to catch a drop of sweat.

The sun is a glittering soft light through the western trees by the time we take stock.

“Nothin’ left to do but water them.” he has his arm over my shoulder, hand nearly brown with caked soil where it hangs against my smudged breast, his undershirt gone translucent from sweat, the oddest attraction to his underarm blooms in me as he huffs in satisfaction next to me. I press a kiss to the swell of his pec instead, he folds with a shocked giggle, he is ticklish.

“It’s very homey.” I pronounce, feeling indeed a bone deep satisfaction over our garden at our own house from our own hands. His elbow crooks further and he has my neck secure in the bend, golden hour light the prettiest thing in the world as he nuzzles our sweaty noses and slowly claims a kiss.

“Our kids are gonna get to play out here for years.” he seems to realize as he lays his head atop mine, his voice sounds so softly comforted I can feel my eyes smart with tears.

He can feel my nod beneath his chin. “And us.” I suggest.

“And us.” he agrees with a laugh, “I’m gonna mow.” He decides suddenly and he is giving me one more smooch before moving away, headed at a jog to the garage for his machine before the sun fully dips. Never one to leave a job slightly imperfect.

I water our new additions while he pushes the mower, strip after strip, along our back yard, closer and closer to complete perfection. I have little doubt that once he finishes this he may find yet another task and knowing we have done enough, I go inside as he finishes the last swaths and grab a tablecloth, an opened bottle of wine along with salami and a brick of cheese. I have these waiting for him on a cloth, laid upon his freshly shorn grass. He cuts the engine, I watch him as he heedlessly take off his soaked singlet and uses it to rub the grass from his eyes. He is beautiful, my boy, where tan skin blends to fair and a strong, lean back disappears into jeans. There are dimples on his back, right below that belt, I know them, I’ve traced them with my tongue.

“C’mon, we’ve done enough. Sit and look at how perfect it is.” I beckon and his face lights up at my little spread, sauntering over, undershirt still clasped in his hand.

“Im filthy.” he warns and runs his hand along his sweat sheened belly in a motion I find obscenely captivating.

I pat at the tablecloth, “So am I.” for my dress is soiled and I am sweaty and only my hands are really fit for food as I scrubbed them thoroughly.

He holds his own up to show their grimey palms yet sits himself beside me anyway, and I notice the callouses dotted along the pads of his hands. I want to kiss them, soil and all.

“Then I’ll feed you.” I reply to his unspoken question and bring a bite to his lips.

We toast each other with the wine, drinking from the bottle and we watch as dusk begins to throw her first veil over the golden light.

“I’m not nauseous anymore these days.” I report and he is sweetly relieved for me, I pull out the pipe I packed for him and hand it to him between salami rolls.

His eyebrow, mobile and ever so empathetic, asks if I am sure but I am, and I watch as the match recreates a golden glow on his face once more today as he lights up and I watch him with the most lazy feeling in the world as he watches our gardens go muted by dusk.

“We’ve really done it.” he observes, relief dripping in his voice, a long exhale tinges the air around me with sweet tobacco and I am reminded of courting, of chasing him down while trying to appear reserved. Of wanting him so badly I had little choice but to remain devoted. The smell of smoke in the street would stop me dead in my tracks, thinking of this young man an ocean away.

I think I know what he means but I need to be certain, and I find I am hungry to know everything, every bit of him. If his current happiness is placed in stark relief against some previous melancholy, I want to know that, too. “What have we done?” I ask teasingly, scooting nearer to him on the cloth and kissing at his shoulder. He smells of gasoline and grass and pipe smoke. And I taste salt when I lick my lips.

“We’ve got ourselves a home.” he grins so easily, my boy, and if it were earlier in the summer there might be fireflies out in the twilight. “And you’re not nauseous anymore.” he giggles.

I’ve wanted long enough these many weeks, when my lips trail from the meat of his shoulder to his beautiful neck, he cannot mistake my intentions.

“O-out here?” he stutters out, hissing at the end by my bite on his fragile throat, i place my hand on his jeans and palm at him. There is still nothing so thrilling to me than the feel of a man firming, the way he awakes to me and only me and at my least whim, even while his mouth is all stuttering questions and his eyes are startled shimmering pools. He is always surprised when I initiate, as if he can imagine his own desire being that needy but not my own, he is always surprised and I realize it may be the only one of the million parts he does not fully know of me: how badly I love him at all times. “N-now?” he is rocking denim clad hips into my palm and their fit has grown impossibly taut.

I have the zipper down, my hand meeting the sweat soaked crease of his thigh and wiry curls that are equally wet from his work, when I wrap my small fist around him, he is clammy and pulsing in my hand. It should be revolting, perhaps, with dirt and gasoline and sweat acting like a gritty lubricant, but nausea has been replaced by something else hungry and while he may have found comfort in having provided the necessary civilian checklist for our lives, I am a woman whose body he has forever altered with his child and I have never loved anything so much as watching him at work. I want to smell it, feel it, taste the gritty earth of the man who has renovated my very flesh.

“Yes, now,” I beg, giving him one last squeeze before I lay myself back, sundress riding up my thighs, “I want you to take me under our gardenia.”

He watches me raptly, boyish eyes fawn-like and batting lashes fluttering like moth wings in the dim light; he rises to his knees and stays there as I unbutton my soiled dress. There are twenty four buttons to the hem and I make theater of each until I am bare. More than he anticipated, for while at work I did enjoy the last bit of clement weather on all my parts.

He makes a pained noise of want at the sight, maybe he too loves the sheen of sweat that makes us both shimmer in the far off patio light, how it reflects off my swelling belly, breasts grown large enough my necklines are impossible to keep discreet. I stop him from tasting me with a foot to his clavicle, I love his mouth but I want to be taken. And he indulges me, shimmying between the parted scraps of my dress and laying himself against my body, denim rough and thrilling against my bare thighs, the slightest space between our bellies lest he crush me. I am hardly large enough for it to be a concern but I can see his fascination with it, his preoccupation, his hair hangs into his eyes as he stares down at where his desire parts my petals and I can feel the drag of him against me, sweat and unabashed want making a swamp of me.

I peak and thrash from the torture of his steady grind alone, and in a typical moment of firm implacability, I feel my husband press into me while I am yet writhing. He scoops the back of my knees into the crook of his elbows, leaning over me with mischief on his face as he folds me, “You started this.” he still has enough self possession to remind before he gives into the grip of my heat and begins to move in me, engaging work-sore muscles not yet fully fatigued.

If my novel new shape has created some preoccupation, if my symptoms and moods had once ruled me in earlier weeks, it is worth it now for the way my body goes alight beneath him, electric delight curling my toes and fuzzing my sternum at each thrust, I respond to him half possessed and he snickers like he knew of this before me. I swell until my sheath is so tight it makes us both keen from it, slippery to the point of cacophonous. I claw at his back and his shoulders don’t stand a chance at remaining unmarred as he stays unperturbed and sweetly vicious inside me, jamming himself deeper. When I begin to scream he lets down a leg and cups my neck, forcing my mouth against his own.

He tastes of wine. I hook my toe into the denim of his waistband and tug it further down, till I can fully see the pale swell of his backside and I think the motion tickles him as he giggles in his rhythm. I can register that the air has grown cool as the sun fully deserts us, leaving us to it with a final curtain call on the happiest day I’ve ever known.

The force of our endeavor has shoved me up the blanket until I am well and truly beneath the far branches of our gardenia. I tilt my head up and smell the blossoms’ heady scent, their leaves and white flowers blending into the canopy of nightly stars beginning to show. Johnny’s warm face is tucked, groaning, into my neck, our bodies so close as he begins to falter in his control that I cannot watch him. So I watch the blossoms above sway in my vision as his need rucks my body up and down beneath them for a few more desperate minutes. I turn my face and press a kiss to his temple, his hair damp with sweat and smelling so much of him I clench. I love you, so good, you’re so good to me, so deep, so deep, I love you- my mind is adrift and where he rocks inside me is all I know and I babble and beg and praise him for it.

His breath is a hot steam over my clavicle, dirty hands tenderly grasping at a swollen breasts, he bites at my lower lip to hush himself when the pleasure overtakes and I too go under one more time, legs drawing up again under the wracking delight and my modest man groans and pants the filthiest appreciations, for taking him, slippery beautiful thing, tightest little cunt, could spend all my days in you, milk me, that’s it milk me sweetheart, you like it when I make you?

What he babbles to me as he spurts is never something later to be answered, it is gibberish and rhetorical and yet I believe every word, treasure them when he rolls off and pants beside me, I will rehearse them in my mind when he is gone to work. I know this last set will have me ready down to my thighs long before five o’clock.

In the cold night air his hands are soothing the damage his forceful want has done, petting my trembling flank down like a horse after a race, it gives me zapping little after-quakes that make him hum into our kisses as his warm palm feels me twitch and clench and melt.

We should go inside soon -we both mumble it at the same time and barely have energy to laugh over it. We stay on the tablecloth, grass texturing our backs, his only movements are to roll me closer to him, pulling my gaping dress with me, and plucking a white starry blossom for behind my ear. After he has placed it he drops his head again, pillowed on my upper arm and I can feel his breath even out across my throat.

My mother did not tell me of this. I have asked others in the most discreet way I can summon, but they all just say they hope I’ll be happy, they’re sure I’ll be happy, he seems to make me happy, they themselves are happy.

It is likely only myself at fault, but now I think of happiness as a very desperate thing, tentative and elusive and ever watchful. I did not expect to find its most distilled essence in quiet things. There is nothing more to write as our happiness did indeed persist after we woke and rose and went to shower, chilly from our exposure, it went on after we had wrapped ourselves under the bedding and clutched at each other like twins. But what is there to relate of such happiness? It has no great drama, it is not so very vigilant unless it is to actively prevent sadness, and even that is welcome here when it must be passing by. Perhaps the poets, or the preachers, or my wise boy would tell me it’s joy I feel. Maybe that was what I was looking for all this time.

Maybe that is what feels so foreignly precious about lying on a blanket with his spend cooling between my legs, our shrubs like loyal sentinels dotting the fence line and my man gently snoring atop me after having created a life sworn to himself when he thought he might die. It is sobering to be integral to that dream, but it is also peaceful.

It is joy, I suppose. Or a sort of Garden Variety Happiness.

Here’s my widdle Brady Taglist, thanks to each of you for expressing such interest and always showing such love. This was a bit of a weird passion project and I’ve got no idea if it actually “worked” but it was the branching out my creative brain needed. So many of y’all are already nailing this Man so well, 🤨😏 I’ve been such a happy recipient of all yalls works. Scream at me. Lemme know. Xoxo

@luminouslywriting

@ktredshoes

@archival-hogwash

@gigisimsonmars

@steph-speaks

@ab4eva

@lilfreebee

@slowsweetlove

@xxanaduwrites

@blurredcolour

@venus-planetof-love

@pearlparty

@winniemaywebber

@sagesolsticewrites

@ginabaker1666

#masters of the air #mota #mota fanfic #mota imagine #mota spoilers #john brady x oc #john brady x reader #John Brady #John Brady imagine #mota smut #mota x reader #ladies who brady

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lgbeattie5 · 2 years ago

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More than a date?

You were bold to think the classic British weather was going to hold off for your afternoon. Despite the downpour, nothing could put a dampener on the date ahead, especially when a familiar car was already waiting in the car park. It was shaped by trees that hadn't lost their foliage despite the season, but even that was pretty.

"Followed my directions, then?" The Scottish accent asked which only brought a smile to your face.

"The sat nav was no help at all. You, however, were very useful." You both went in for a kiss, short and sweet but it was electric. Her hand fell to hold your waist, she brought you in closer so that your hands could rest against her chest at that moment. "We can get you a new car with a new sat nav," Jen promised.

"Can we? When we're married and halfway through the mortgage payments?" You teased back, letting your date lead you towards the hill, hand in hand.

Things with Jen had been steady for a while, neither of you bothering with titles but in all honesty, you'd probably passed the threshold by now. You've done everything from hiking together to a tufting workshop you'd dragged her to that ended up with you taking home her rainbow rug that is proudly serving its purpose at the end of your bed. You'd been to watch her play, she's taken you to work the odd few times whenever training allows her. It wasn't long before you were heading out of the trees, climbing a hill that she had finally stopped dragging you up.

"How about I take us away? The next international break... you'll get time off, right? So what if we get away? Somewhere warm. Or somewhere touristy." You suggested, thinking out loud as you walked, kicking whatever stone got in your way. You didn't need to look at Jen to know what she was doing, she was grinning at you. You were surprised she hadn't picked up an injury the way her head snapped towards you at your suggestion.

"Do dates take each other away to do touristy things?" Jen asked, only teasing you but by that point, you'd reached the top and the views had taken your attention. You'd both been there enough to know what was at the top but it seemed so breathtaking every time.

You weren't alone for long before Jen's arms were wrapped around you, securing you against her body that was thankfully radiating pure warmth. "That came out wrong." She started in your ear, her breath sending shivers down your spine. "If my more than date wanted to take us away, I'd be glad of the opportunity."

"Your more than date? See, I don't think I can do that type of commitment." You teased. "If, hypothetically, your more than date was to suggest Budapest. Or Italy. Or France. Or Spain."

"I think my more than date is getting ahead of herself. Hypothetically."

"Barcelona. Your girlfriend wants to take you to Barcelona." You grin, feeling her hold on you tighten. You can practically hear the giddiness in her voice.

#jen beattie #jen beattie x reader #jen beattie imagine #arsenal wfc #woso x reader #woso imagine

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random-thought-depository · 2 years ago

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""Moreover, it turns out that the United States is not all that tightfisted when it comes to social spending. “If you count all public benefits offered by the federal government, America’s welfare state (as a share of its gross domestic product) is the second biggest in the world, after France’s,” Desmond tells us. Why doesn’t this largesse accomplish more?

For one thing, it unduly assists the affluent. That statistic about the U.S. spending almost as much as France on social welfare, he explains, is accurate only “if you include things like government-subsidized retirement benefits provided by employers, student loans and 529 college savings plans, child tax credits, and homeowner subsidies: benefits disproportionately flowing to Americans well above the poverty line.” To enjoy most of these, you need to have a well-paying job, a home that you own, and probably an accountant (and, if you’re really in clover, a money manager).

“The American government gives the most help to those who need it least,” Desmond argues. “This is the true nature of our welfare state, and it has far-reaching implications, not only for our bank accounts and poverty levels, but also for our psychology and civic spirit.” Americans who benefit from social spending in the form of, say, a mortgage-interest tax deduction don’t see themselves as recipients of governmental generosity. The boon it offers them may be as hard for them to recognize and acknowledge as the persistence of poverty once was to Harrington’s suburban housewives and professional men. These Americans may be anti-government and vote that way. They may picture other people, poor people, as weak and dependent and themselves as hardworking and upstanding. Desmond allows that one reason for this is that tax breaks don’t feel the same as direct payments. Although they may amount to the same thing for household incomes and for the federal budget—“You can benefit a family by lowering its tax burden or by increasing its benefits, same difference”—they are associated with an obligation and a procedure that Americans, in particular, find onerous. Tax-cutting Republican lawmakers want the process to be both difficult and Swiss-cheesed with loopholes. (“Taxes should hurt,” Ronald Reagan once said.) But that’s not the only reason. What Desmond calls the “rudest explanation” is that if, for whatever reason, we get a tax break, most of us like it. That’s the case for people affluent and lucky enough to take advantage of the legitimate breaks designed for their benefit, and for the wily super-rich who game the system with expensive lawyering and ingenious use of tax shelters.

And there are other ways, Desmond points out, that government help gets thwarted or misdirected. When President Clinton instituted welfare reform, in 1996, pledging to “transform a broken system that traps too many people in a cycle of dependence,” an older model, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or A.F.D.C., was replaced by Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF. Where most funds administered by A.F.D.C. went straight to families in the form of cash aid, TANF gave grants to states with the added directive to promote two-parent families and discourage out-of-wedlock childbirth, and let the states fund programs to achieve those goals as they saw fit. As a result, “states have come up with rather creative ways to spend TANF dollars,” Desmond writes. “Nationwide, for every dollar budgeted for TANF in 2020, poor families directly received just 22 cents. Only Kentucky and the District of Columbia spent over half of their TANF funds on basic cash assistance.” Between 1999 and 2016, Oklahoma directed more than seventy million dollars toward initiatives to promote marriage, offering couples counselling and workshops that were mostly open to people of all income levels. Arizona used some of the funds to pay for abstinence education; Pennsylvania gave some of its TANF money to anti-abortion programs. Mississippi treated its TANF funds as an unexpected Christmas present, hiring a Christian-rock singer to perform at concerts, for instance, and a former professional wrestler—the author of an autobiography titled “Every Man Has His Price”—to deliver inspirational speeches. (Much of this was revealed by assiduous investigative reporters, and by a 2020 audit of Mississippi’s Department of Human Services.) Moreover, because states don’t have to spend all their TANF funds each year, many carry over big sums. In 2020, Tennessee, which has one of the highest child-poverty rates in the nation, left seven hundred and ninety million dollars in TANF funds unspent."

- The New Yorker: "How America Manufactures Poverty" by Margaret Talbot (review of Matthew Desmond's Poverty by America).

#that last quoted paragraph is infuriating #class politics

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pattern-recognition · 1 year ago

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re:the brutalism post, what do you mean when you say "the landscape" of the US? My interpretation is that you're talking in terms of literal landmass and how populations are dispersed, so I'm confused about why that'd present a more significant barrier to successful socialist organizing in the US than it did in other, larger countries like China or Russia that have seen successful large-scale socialist/communist movements. I don't mean this as a gotcha - I really don't feel that I'm educated enough to know why it might be notably different in the US.

Where i was going with that post before it evolved into a discourse about brutalism, which i never really intended, was towards the atomization of American social life. More so than any aesthetics of architecture form and what they mean, I was motioning towards the ways in which the built landscape in the US is specifically designed to isolate people, dehumanize them, and make living as hard as possible for people without the privileges of wealth. The most obvious example is the homelessness crisis and car based infrastructure. it’s true that there are more empty homes in the US than there are homeless people, but even then those homes are of the most deleterious type, even compared to other capitalist nations like Francs, Britain, etc. American zoning laws, in most cities, eschew affordable high-rise apartment buildings for single family, two story at most, housing that forces people into having a vested interest, wether they like it or not, in capitalist real-estate speculation through mortgages and whatnot. The phenomenon of suburbia in the United Stated was specifically an anti-communist one and heavily parallels the Wehrbauer system in Nazi Germany. The latter, should it have come to fruition fallowing Gerneralplan Ost (the mass genocide of all eastern european peoples and subsequent resettlement of eastern europe by Germanic colonizers) would have been structured around a system of semi self reliant small business owners and peasants (and I use this word in the Marxian sense, as in small land owners in control of their own means of production) who would act as a bulwark against both physical reprisals by freedom fighters (the Wehrbauers were intended to be heavily armed) as well as an ideological one because communities where everyone is a petit bourgeois would be resistant to Marxist agitation. The parallels to contemporary American suburbs, as well as the settlement and colonization of the west through manifest destiny, should be obvious.

#splittheeadam #there are many many more examples but i hope this one suffices

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alatariel-gildaen · 8 months ago

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Everything's going wrong, and I really feel like I'm about to lose it.

Firstly, we're stuck in a maisonette with rising damp and mould, and the freeholders are doing precisely NOTHING about it all.

This has caused major respiratory conditions for all three of us. The worst of the damp and mould is in my disabled son's bedroom - this is what it currently looks like in there

The wallpaper and plaster have fallen away, the wall itself is actually wet, I'm cleaning mould up every day. We've had to throw away toys, bedding, books, and clothes of his that have been destroyed by mould.

We can't move, because we own the flat and no one will buy it with this problem, and we can't fix it ourselves, because its a structural issue that is the responsibility of the freeholder, and they have done nothing but ignore our pleas for the last 2 and a half years.

Ok, ready for the rollercoaster that's making me lose it? Strap in.

Now, as my son is disabled, and we're a relatively low income family, we were able to apply to the family fund for a holiday, something we've not been able to afford to do for YEARS.

This Friday, we're due to fly out to the south of France for a week. The FF awarded us £500 towards the holiday, but we had to pay the rest out of our savings, costing us just about £1200, and depleting our savings to nothing. We figured it'd be worth it - the holiday park we're going to sounds utterly perfect for him, with lots of nature, wildlife, and secure facilities with easy access. Something we simply wouldn't have even considered without the FF's help. Yes, it was still expensive, but the memories would be utterly priceless.

A couple of week's ago my car's engine light came on. Honestly something I'd probably be ignoring right now normally, but my husband was due to take his driving test in it this week before we fly out, and we are pretty sure that you can't take it in a car with the engine light showing. We managed to get it seen, and it requires around £800 worth of repairs. I cannot function without a car - it's absolutely vital for transporting my son and keeping him safe.

As I mentioned before, we've all had respiratory problems linked to the mould. My poor son seems to have a permanent frog in his throat. I've been diagnosed with asthma following a cough that I've had now since last November. A few weeks ago, my husband developed a similar nasty cough. And last week that cough suddenly got worse. He was vomiting due to the cough, in pain from head to toe, shivering and shaking.

Yesterday it was so bad, we called NHS 111, and they were so worried, they sent out an ambulance.

He's been admitted to hospital with pneumonia caused by the damp and mould. He can't take his driving test (obviously) and we are most likely going to lose out on our holiday.

I'm self employed but been unable to work much due to illness, but I'm going to have to put that aside.

So, I'm begging you, please help out a struggling artist, mother to a disabled child, and wife to a terribly ill husband. If I can book in a few pet portraits, I'll be able to cover our mortgage this month, and hopefully recover some of our lost holiday money, as well as keep my car on the road.

Here are some examples of my work.

Mostly I work in coloured pencil on pastelmat, although occasionally I can also do drafting film (if the subject allows for it) Commissions are £140 for an A4 piece and that will include postage to anywhere in mainland UK - outside of the mainland, of course I'll have to charge extra for postage.

I appreciate these aren't cheap, but a lot of work goes into them. If you could please reblog to get this seen, I would appreciate it so so much.

I am in the process of setting up a website for these, but feel free to contact me here in the meantime.

Thank you so much for taking time to read, and reblogs to signal boost are hugely appreciated

#artists on tumblr #pencil artist #personal shizz #please help #please reblog #i'm genuinely scared for the future right now

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conradscrime · 1 year ago

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The Bath School Disaster, 1927

August 13, 2023

The village of Bath was located just a short distance from the city of Lansing, Michigan. In 1922, the town voted for a school district, which also would lead to an increase in property taxes for the town to be able to afford the new school. The creation of the school was extremely controversial in the town.

When the school had opened there was 236 children that attended, all from grade one to grade twelve.

Andrew Kehoe was born in Tecumseh, Michigan on February 1, 1872. After graduating high school, Andrew studied electrical engineering at Michigan State College and worked as an electrician in Missouri for years.

During his time working as an electrician, Andrew had sustained a head injury from a fall and it was reported that he supposedly had been in a coma for several weeks after. He eventually healed somewhat and moved back to Michigan to live on his father's farm.

After Andrew's mother died his father married a woman who was younger than him, Frances Wilder, and the two had a daughter together.

On September 17, 1911, Frances had tried to light the family's oil stove, when it suddenly exploded and set her on fire. Andrew through a bucket of water on her but the fire being oil-based, it ended up spreading the flames quicker. Frances died the next day due to her injuries. Later on there was a rumour that Andrew had caused the stove explosion purposely.

The following year in 1912, Andrew married a woman named Nellie Price and a few years later they moved to a farm outside of Bath. Andrew was known by his neighbours as always doing favours and volunteering to help others. However, Andrew also had an impatient side, even killing a neighbour's dog who had annoyed him with it's barking. Andrew also beat one of his horses to death when it did not perform what he wanted it to do.

In 1924, Andrew was elected as a trustee on the school board and had even been the treasurer for a year. He argued a lot for lower taxes and was known to be difficult to work with, often voting against the board. He would claim he paid too much in taxes and tried to get the value of his property reduced so he would pay less.

In 1922, the school tax was $12.26 for every $1000 valuation of a property -- in 1923 the school board raised this to $18.80 per $1000, in 1926 it was $19.80.

In 1926, Andrew's tax liability was $198.00 and he found out that the family member who held the mortgage on his property was starting foreclosure proceedings. It was later on said from a local sheriff who had served the notice to Andrew, he had muttered, "If it hadn't been for that $300 school tax I might have paid off this mortgage."

In 1925, Andrew was appointed as temporary town clerk, but was defeated the following year -- this public rejection made him angry.

One of Andrew's neighbours noticed he had stopped working on his farm in 1926 and had believed he was possibly planning to end his own life. Andrew had given this neighbour one of his horses in April 1927, but the neighbour returned it. Andrew had also cut all his wire fences, seemingly preparing to destroy his farm. He also put lumber and materials in a tool shed and later destroyed it with a bomb.

At the time the bombing happened, Nellie, Andrew's wife had symptoms quite similar to tuberculosis. She often was in the hospital, which could have added to the family debt. Andrew had stopped making mortgage and insurance payments months before.

It is believed that Andrew had begun his plan of bombing the school after being defeated as towns clerk in 1926. During that summer he had access to the school building. He had bought pyrotol, an explosive as well as dynamite. Both of these were frequent things farmers used so it did not seem odd he would be purchasing them.

Neighbours even called him "the dynamite farmer" because they would often hear the sounds of explosions on his property. After the bombing occurred police found that dynamite had been stolen from a bridge construction site, Andrew was suspected as having stolen it.

Andrew spent a considerable amount of time buying explosives, going in between his house and the school with them. On May 16, 1927, Nellie was discharged from the hospital and it was in between this day and the day of the bombings, May 18, that her husband Andrew murdered her.

Andrew put her body in a wheelbarrow behind the chicken coop where it was later found very charred. Around the wheelbarrow he had placed silverware and a metal cash box that banknotes could be seen in it. Andrew had wired homemade pyrotol firebombs in his home and the farm's buildings.

Around 8:45 am on May 18, 1927 the bombs exploded in Andrew's house and farm buildings. Neighbours noticed the fire and volunteers rushed over. As people were going over to the property to help, Andrew drove off in his truck, stopping to tell them they better head over to the school.

Classes began at the school at 8:30 am, and Andrew had made sure the bombs would begin going off at 8:45 am. Rescuers heading over to Andrew's farm heard the school explosion and turned back. Many people were killed initially, 38 of them and most were children.

The scene was chaos, with many people rushing to help remove debris to look for wounded children. Many witnessed mother's moving extremely heavy bricks on their own, frantically searching for their babies.

One mother, Mrs. Hart, was sitting on a bank near the school and had two little dead girls on either side of her. She was holding a little boy named Percy, and right then Andrew blew his car up on the street, wounding little Percy, Mrs. Hart's oldest child. He later died in the hospital.

The north wing of the school collapsed, where the roof was on the ground and there was about 5-6 children under the roof in a pile. One man even volunteered to grab some heavy rope to be able to pull the roof off of the children. The man later stated on his way back to his farm for rope he saw Andrew drive by him and he waved and had the biggest grin on his face.

Andrew drove up to the school about 30 minutes after the first explosion. Andrew got out of his truck and detonated the explosives he had stored in there, killing himself, 3 other men and one second grader named Cleo Clayton who had wandered out of the school building in the initial explosion.

The explosion from Andrew's truck spread debris over a big area, and many cars parked in the area had damage, including several roofs catching on fire.

During the search for more survivors and victims, it was found that 500 more pounds of dynamite that had not been detonated was in the south wing of the school. It is believed that the initial explosion caused a short circuit in the second bombs, preventing them from going off.

Police searched Andrew's farm, looking for Nellie and eventually found her charred remains the following day. All of the farm buildings had been destroyed and two of Andrew's horses had been burned to death. Their legs had been tied together with wire, preventing them from being able to escape.

There was a wooden sign wired to the farm's fence that Andrew had stenciled "Criminals are made, not born."

The Red Cross had received many donations that were sent in to pay for medical expenses for the survivors and burial costs of those who did not make it.

Andrew's body was claimed by his sister and was buried in an unmarked grave in the pauper's section of Mount Rest Cemetery in St. Johns, Michigan. Nellie's family buried her in a Landing cemetery under her maiden name.

It was no question that Andrew Kehoe was the perpetrator of the bombings, however at the coroner's inquest the jury needed to determine whether the school board or employees were guilty of criminal negligence. After more than a week, the jury exonerated the school board and employees. This was determined as Andrew had hidden his plan quite well from everyone around him.

It was determined that Andrew murdered superintendent Huyck, as he had asked him to come over by his truck right before it exploded. Andrew had also been determined to have acted alone, and murdered 43 people in total, including his wife Nellie. Andrew's own suicide was considered the 44th causality.

On August 22, 1927, 3 months after the bombing, Beatrice Gibbs, a 4th grader at the time of the bombing died following a hip surgery. Her death was considered the 45th death attributed to the Bath School disaster. This makes it the deadliest attack to ever occur in an American school.

Richard Fritz was injured in the explosion and died almost a year later from myocarditis at 8 years old. His older sister, Marjorie, had died in the explosion. Richard is not listed as one of the victims, however his death is thought to be directly caused by an infection from his injuries.

School resumed on September 5, 1927 and was held in the community hall, town hall and two retail buildings for the year. Many donations were given to help rebuild, and the damaged portion of the school was demolished, with a new wing being built. The new school, James Couzens Agricultural School was dedicated on August 18, 1928.

In 1975, the building was demolished and was then rebuilt as the James Couzens Memorial Park, dedicated to the victims. In 1991, a Michigan State Historical Marker was installed. In 2002, a bronze plaque with the names of those killed was placed near the entrance.

On May 1, 2022, weeks away from the disaster's 95th anniversary, Irene Dunham who was the last Bath School student from the time of the bombing died at the age of 114.

The Bath School disaster is regarded to some as an act of terrorism. Medical experts wrote it was "the largest pediatric terrorist disaster in U.S. history."

#true crime #crime #unsolved mysteries #unsolved #murder #homicide #unsolved case #solved #mystery #school

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