On Workers in the Age of Rejection
6-5-2025
On Workers in the Age of Rejection: We know that if we touch that hot stove, we’re gonna get burnt and its gonna hurt like hell. We know that because some other person did that and passed it on. Most of us learn from prior people’s experiences and some of us add to that learned knowledge. They are the ones who ask questions for which we have no prior collective knowledge of. They are the ones among us who become the scientists, the inventors, the philosophers, the artists, the explorers. They add to our pool of experience and increase our ability to learn, know and prosper. You’d think we’d welcome this process of questions, answers and the quest for knowing more. There was once an “Age of Enlightenment” where we celebrated increasing our shared knowledge. If we were to label our current state, it would be more accurate to call the state of things “The Age of Rejection”.
In a flip of human progress, we have not only stopped asking questions, we are rejecting the solid answers we have gathered throughout our human existence. Today, there are no truths, no credible prior knowledge, those who seek to answer the unknown through a logical, experienced-tested scientific process, are rejected. In its place is an embrace of the anti-knowledge, the un-credentialed, the conspiracy theories, the utterly ridiculous. We are purposely destroying our educational capacity, our libraries of known truths and ending any quest to add to our former progress. But if your unqualified or just plain nuts, we’re all ears.
We’ve developed new ways of solidifying our ignorance. We don’t read or write much more than a X texts and talking points. We refuse to use our critical thinking skills. We prefer to be guided by entertainment, optics, outrageousness and base emotion. We are in a quest to return to the cave, except we still want our air conditioning, smart phones and cars. We’re seeking the bliss of ignorance through denial and drugs. Living in the Age of Rejection can be hard work and unhealthy.
The problem, of course, is that we do live in a real world. One where we have a huge need of those stores of prior experiences. We need the educators and pioneers. We don’t need them as an accessory to life. We need them as a critical part of our survival and progress. When we reject them, we are essentially destroying our future. Selfishly, because its not just our own future, but the future of coming generations. To be clear, the Age of Rejection is a nation signing a suicide pact.
Working people are uniquely at risk in the Age of Rejection. In America, we are many generations away from the era of mass unionization and the Great Depression. The learned experience that came from workers’ struggles, with the exception of those who have gone through more recent organizing battles, has dimmed or is all but gone. Without the knowledge of those experiences, we don’t understand the underpinnings of our middle class and our upward mobility. Those union stalwarts, that gave their blood and lives for a better life, are not a part of most people’s store of knowledge. Their unknown lives leave a gap in our need to be inspired by what they accomplished together. This isn’t by happenstance. It’s the result of a concerted effort to vaporize those who stand for working people, conscious decisions to wipe their contributions and struggles from our educations, and demonize those who dare to stand against greed and the evils of extreme concentrations of wealth. In our Age of Rejection, those learned collective lessons are cast aside in favor of snake oil salesmen and the anti-worker media machine that the opportunists among us heavily fund.
Working people should be in a total revolt right now. Every piece of the economic and social foundations we stand on is being dynamited, right in front of our very eyes. Workers’ rights, reflected in labor law, workplace safety and health protections, healthcare and pension security, contract enforcement, wage-theft bans, equality in hiring and employment, trade fairness and so much more, are being ripped up wholesale. It won’t be long until we’re back to being legally jailed and shot taking on the boss.
The cumulative impact is being felt as workers are shoved back down the economic and social ladder to our prior state of subservience. This has been going on for several decades now. It’s what’s driving our current dissatisfactions. Yet we can’t seem to see our own insanity, as we cheer on those who are bent on a new era of worker exploitation and poverty? We have voluntarily put on blinders to avoid seeing who is carrying out the deconstruction of the working family in America.
The bitterly learned lessons of worker solidarity have eluded most of us who work for wages. We should know that the boss has always used a divide and conquer strategy on us. It wasn’t until workers overcame the divisions of racism, sexism, religious intolerance and cultural heritage, that we succeeded in gaining a fair share of our labors. It wasn’t until we decided to put a collar on wealth and greed, that we achieved a modicum of opportunity and prosperity. It wasn’t until we demanded our government work for average people, that we found the power to get our just due. It wasn’t until we stood up, fought and carried out a sustained self-organizing movement, that the promise of the American Dream was put in reach. It wasn’t until we came to understand that we needed to be concerned and offer a hand up to all working people, that we gathered the strength to prevail. But we don’t know those lessons anymore. As they say, since we don’t stand for anything, we’re falling for anything. In the process we’re selling out those who fought for us and selling out ourselves.
To be blunt, we need to get our heads out of our asses! We need to join hands with working people, no matter who they are, what they look like, where they come from, who they love or what anyone else tells us about them. If we don’t relearn what our forefathers and foremothers came to understand, the wealthy and powerful will have their way with us again. And they are currently making grand progress.
This is a call to reject “Rejectionism”: To embrace a new era of enlightenment, to understand and rebuild the pillars of security that others left for us, to re-forge solidarity among working families and communities, to understand that it’s not those equal or worse off than we are that are threatening our prospects. It is those with more, and who will never have enough, that must be brought to heel. That takes guts and a clear sense of what we’ve learned, and a determination to learn more. As those that came before us knew, this is the path to economic security and real freedom.
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