Suzy

Imagine, if you will… A crowded hall on a gray afternoon. The air is thick with the smell of coffee and worry. In the front rows sit ordinary people — the kind who check the price of eggs twice, who know the exact day their rent is due, who measure their medicine by the week and their gas by the quarter tank. Their hands are calloused or ink-stained or worn thin from years of showing up. They are tired in the way only people who work for a living get tired. Before them stands a man in a well-cut suit. He speaks with the calm authority of someone who has never had to choose between the electric bill and the co-pay. He looks out at them, nods, and says he understands. He knows how hard it is. Then he tells them, without irony, that the energy companies — and the men who run them — are making billions. He says this as if it is good news. As if their struggle is the necessary cost of someone else’s triumph. And then, one by one, the people begin to clap. They applaud the man who has just explained, in plain language, that their hardship is profitable. They cheer the very arrangement that keeps them struggling. Not because they are cruel, or foolish, or any more broken than the rest of us. But because, in this particular place, at this particular moment, the applause feels easier than the alternative. Submitted for your approval: a gathering of working people who have learned to applaud the distance between their lives and the lives of those who profit from them. Welcome to…the Twilight Zone.