Blue Collar Blues

As I mentioned previously, I've been working the blue collar trades again to make ends meet. Been meeting a whole bunch of new guys I work with, and like most men who labor together for hours, we start to share our life stories.

I literally work with an entire crew of men who are all forced to work under-the-table just to survive, because working above board and on the books would result in garnishment of their wages by the State of Hawaii child support enforcement bureaucracy.

These are guys in their mid-40's with ex-wives getting 60% of their unemployment checks garnished...and unemployment checks are only a fraction of what these guys used to make before joining the swelling ranks of laid off workers in our Great Depression 2.0.

One guy's story is especially maddening.

He came home one day because a job had gotten rained out, only to find the mother of his two children getting her ass nailed to the bed by their neighbor. He went nuts punching holes in the wall and breaking things (but never touched her) while the neighbor ran out of the house. The cops got called and he ended up getting arrested for domestic violence.

She ended up with the house and a child support settlement.

He drives an old beat up pickup truck, she drives a lexus.

He lives in a small apartment, she a three bedroom house in an upper middle class property in suburbia, and her never employed loser boyfriend lives with her and the two kids.

She hasn't had any kind of job in 20 years. He's essentially paying her to live a comfortable life for her and her live-in surf bum fuckbuddy.

She gets 60% of his unemployment check, forcing him to find under-the-table work just to pay his own rent, food and transportation bills.

She regularly denies him visitation. He's filed more petitions than he can count to force her to allow him time with the kids he's supposed to have under their court adjudicated divorce settlement. They never enforce her violations of his visitation rights. The only thing he ever gets told is to file another petition. He finally gave up in frustration.

His son is now in his late teens...and he, like so many other boys raised in the typical broken home of our brave new world order, has gone off the rails and gotten involved in petty crimes, drugs and is now in rehab.

And now the ex-wife is telling him that once the boy turns 18, she thinks it would be better for the boy to come live with him in his one bedroom apartment.

While he is like most guys, a blue pill dude all the way, he fully comprehended the injustice of it all. He noted that of course, as soon as the son was no longer going to bring her child support revenue, only then does she now want their son to spend quality time with him.

In my new-coworker's words "Unreal, yeah? I'm basically a slave to her! I'm barely making ends meet, and she's buying jewelry and a new car ever few years...all paid for with my sweat and hard work!"

That's when I quipped "Now you know the truth. They call it No-fault divorce, but they treat it like it's "his-fault."

He laughed when I said that. He said he could only laugh now, because he'd spent so many hours just driving around the island while crying.

I assured him that I indeed knew very well precisely what he was talking about. His story is all too common nowadays. But he is finally hopeful. Despite realizing his ex is playing the system to the hilt, he's still happy to finally have a chance to get to know his son again and try and help him regain a shot at a productive, non-criminal life. And his daughter is only 13, so he's only got 5 more years left of his unjust peonage to his cheating whore and parasite of an ex-wife.

The real travesty of it all is just how common this whole system is. The family court system is a vampire, sucking the life blood of civilized society, one broken family at a time. This is unsustainable in the long run. I've seen this story so many times now in friends, family and acquaintances. Most people never grok the big picture of it all, because they are so consumed with the personal details of their own personal tragedies the system mires them in.

My co-worker told me "the system is broken."

I disagreed. The system is doing precisely what it was designed to do. He asked me what I meant.

Time to hand out a red pill.

I told him that the Federal Government literally matches the funds for every dollar taken from his check in child support. He knew that...he just never considered the implications of it. I said "Think about it...the Federal Government is literally paying the State of Hawaii to break up families like yours. It's an industry unto itself. It's official government policy to break up families. All those social workers and courts...they make their entire living doing what they did to you, to men all over the country."

He was speechless for quite awhile, working while thinking about our conversation intently.

Despite becoming a commonplace experience, most people fail to realize the larger truth that the broken family subsidized by the garnished wages of the working man is the Government preferred family model of our Brave New World Order.