Broken Men in a Small Town

They filed into the Wendy’s, one or two graciously holding the door for the others.

Sun browned, smashed fingers, torn joints, well fed but malnourished.

Happy enough. But, maybe it’s just my imagination, holding onto something so very hard. Hope? Or this moment? Or just happiness itself? The moment of shade and sitting down?

Some of them will make it out ok I imagine. Others will be chewed up by the System, their broken bodies left by the wayside, their value extracted, their worth - from the bosses perspective - expended. Maybe they’ll get disability.

Lied to I have to guess. “Sufficient effort guarantees you’ll be ‘ok’”. Or maybe they know the game and they’re playing it as best they can, I dunno.

So many people who put the work in, still left behind, still hungry and sick and poor.

Mind you, I’m not one for saying you need to earn your happiness or your safety or your medicine or your food.

Not just the men of course, though these five or six are what inspired this piece. Humans. Giving it their all, their bodies, their lives. And maybe to bosses who also did something similar in turn, to some degree, for some time. And maybe those bosses are forking cash over to people who did the same?

Would it be more or less comforting to know those at the top of the pyramid are suffering like the rest of us? Would I get some schadenfreude or be driven mad to know the presidents and the CEOs are as miserable as everyone else?

Bit of both perhaps.