Living In Car, Urinating At Work

TERRENCE WISE lives in his minivan in Kansas City with his fiance and three little girls. He works at Taco Bell and Burger King, and has for a long time, putting in over forty hours a week, at about nine dollars an hour. He is 37, and has been working fast food since he was sixteen. He hasn't been to a dentist in eighteen years, and hasn't seen his mother, who lives in South Carolina, in ten years. Statistics indicate that millions of Americans are in the same boat as he, living in a car, working full time, with little or no hope for improvement of living condition. The federal minimum wage of seven twenty five an hour would be adequate, if this were the year 1980, not 2016. The multi millionaires who own corporations like Taco Bell and Burger King point out that if the minimum wage is significantly increased, jobs will be lost, and customers will be forced to pour their drinks, rather than enjoying the convenience of being waited on. Meanwhile, the fight for fifteen movement is gaining momentum across the land of the free, but is dominated by minimum wage workers, not millionaire owners or politicians, whose political careers,are far more dependent on the millionaire owners than the minimum wage workers, since the millionaires and billionaires pay for the political advertising which, incredibly, persuades the workers to vote for conservative candidates whose only plan is to please their wealthy benefactors. Philosophers from Plato to James Madison have always known that the much more massively numerous poor class in any society has the potential power to control the economic and political systems, but that dirty little secret is kept well hidden from the rest of us by a thick smokey screen of endless mindless diversionary entertainment, the opiate of the masses. But the very fact that cities like Seattle and Washington D.C. and Los Angeles are raising their minimum wages, and the fact that the fight for a living wage is gaining strength across the fruited plain gives us hope, hope that one fine day good hard working people like Terrence Wise will be able to park their cars in a driveway, walk into a decent house, and go to sleep in a bed, so that they can get up the next morning, get ready to go to work, without having to straighten their collars in the rear view mirror, and hold their urine until they get to work.