Sunday, May 1, 2016

Glass Ceiling Cripples

I imagine women aren’t the only victims of the glass ceiling. The upper region of the corporate hierarchy must be a brutal terrain for anyone who isn’t male or white or Christian or straight. So no doubt corporate cripples are in that same rocky boat.

I imagine there are corporate cripples who make $92 million a year and resent the fact that some uncrippled bozo who works half as hard they do has a corner office and makes $95 million. And that’s not fair, I guess. I mean, technically, discrimination is discrimination is discrimination. It can be neither condoned nor tolerated in any form or on any level, right? Whenever you hurt my crippled brother you hurt me too and blah blah blah.

I’ve never met a glass ceiling cripple, or at least not one who is out of the closet about it. But there must some out there. It's impossible for there not to be. That’s just how things work. On the other hand, I’ve met tons of cripples on the opposite end of the getting-fucked-over spectrum. Screw the glass ceiling. These cripples are worried about the creaky floor. Whenever they move, the floorboards beneath them buckle and crack and moan. If the floor collapses these cripples will plummet into a bottomless pit of poverty hell. No cripple wants to go back there again.

It took a long time and a lot of people to build that floor. The major floorboards are stuff like Medicaid and Medicare and Social Security. But suppose some of those assholes in Washington finally get their way someday and the operation of all those things is turned over to Wall Street. Yikes! That’s like withdrawing all the money that funds those programs from the bank, converting it into $100 bills and dumping it all out of a helicopter hovering over a country club. Oh yeah baby! Make it raaaaaaaaain!

And how about those other assholes in the state capitols who insist that the cost of keeping up this floor is what’s driving us all to bankruptcy. They'd just as soon let the floor rot away. So they won’t even do routine maintenance. Those guys are no better than fucking slumlords.

I shouldn’t be so dismissive about glass ceiling discrimination. Someday maybe I’ll be in a position to experience it myself and then I’ll understand how it really feels. I doubt that will ever happen to me but who knows. Maybe it will, if I keep wishing hard enough.



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