By the Arch of Our Backs

A speaker uses a phrase passed around in failed relationships, to gain equal footing in his headship with us. Peasants. While we are still at his feet. He asks, “What do you bring to the table?” To you as a wise citizen, I say you bring your experience. Not just for your job, but for these treacherous speeches. I don’t bring my feelings, I get even with his eloquence.

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This question gets thrown around by men in power in particular. But he didn’t add the question mark. No. He already knows what you bring to the table. He already knows your worth better than you do, but uses it to tap a ruler on both of your shoulders. Since this is a lot, I can already hear you listing your achievements in your head. This is already a problem. To list them is to justify your existence to a man who has already decided your rank.

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You are supposed to feel good about your achievements; it is something owed to us. But your achievements and experiences are the very thing the speakers use against us. We bring a lot to the table, so we are welcome to it. The trick is: this status of being invited, is waving as a flag before our faces. Of course, we see that as promised potential and promised money.

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If you continue working hard, not for yourself but for the man in the suit, you will potentially get more money. But you already know that potential from such a man means absolutely nothing. Those are words before you see the man. Unless he removes the table, you aren’t standing next to him, you’re seated before him.

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“My brother died last year. He had a learning disability. As an adult he wandered from job to job in virtual poverty.” While empathy would be a great match for this part of his speech, sympathy might follow as you let that line fester in your hardened heart: it is yet still not the focus. There has been a greater thing revealed. If you’ve displayed any weakness under the system, you will die in poverty. The system does not care about your obstacles, your name gets scrubbed off the register. Sorry, I meant to be effaced from the register.

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“It is utter nonsense. Utter nonsense to suggest that everybody has got a fair chance. Utter nonsense.” While he mirrors our anger, it is utter nonsense that we might one day sit around our own living room table, where the only guest invited is a bleak future. It is utter nonsense to suggest that we will have enough to pay our bills while the table we serve is laden with the grapes of our exhaustion.

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The system wants you to stand on your own two feet; it wants you to climb for your own portion. It offered the veneer of a fair chance, but the legs of that table are each and every one of us. Those of us who have wandered from job to job until we are broke: without worry, without fear, and without rage. Our pockets are empty because we do as we are told. We do not need a leader to tell us what we bring to his table. We need a system where the table is no longer a barricade between those who rule and those who survive. Until then, his eloquence is just ambient noise. We are seated in the ambient noise of the fridge inhaling its last, and the washing machine spinning its worst. Which credit card will pay for it? More debt is what will.

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We ride buses fearing we won’t get to work on time, and even then we fall asleep because last night we spent too much time doom scrolling. Yet another phrasing that stood witness to reality. We are doomed, scrolling is there to confirm this. It is in every ad, and they need a problem to make money from that problem.

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We drive our cars fearing we won’t have money to pay for the fuel, no room in our minds to think about whether there are parking spots, and there is an extra digit that turned into two. We smile at each other, just to say we feel it too.

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The rising shame in having been to school, college, university with nothing to show for it. The hierarchy was already decided. Even in the word: we are “hired” while they stand above the arch. The arch is not stone: the arch is our backs bent too far out of shape. We aren’t in shape, because there’s no time for it. We are out of shape, because we do what we are told. This kills our health, and so then, we will be the equivalent to his brother. If our minds are not gone, then our health will be.