I dragged myself out of bed early today so I could have breakfast at Kate’s Kitchen in the Lower Haight before I went to work. Kate’s Kitchen makes me unendingly happy. If I get the French toast and a cup of coffee, I can spend less than ten bucks to sit there for an hour, fill my gullet, and watch all the action on the street while quietly contemplating my existence. And of course there’s always some foxy guy sitting by himself at another table to wake me up and get my juices flowing. The walk to the restaurant from my apartment in the Western Addition is an additional bonus, as coming over the hill on Fillmore gives me a great view of the fog rolling through Buena Vista Park looking one way, and the sun reflecting off the skyline and the Bay going the other.

My tranquility was of course interrupted by the reality of living in the United States today. As I rounded the corner onto Haight Street I saw the latest nightmare on the newsstand. I seems that Bush is now reserving the right to nuke countries connected with terrorists. So now all the waitresses and maids and shopkeepers on the streets of Baghdad or Tripoli or Pyongyang deserve to be vaporized for the plottings of a few spoiled-brat-son-of-oil-billionaires like Mohammed Atta. Somehow I am supposed to be comforted that global thermonuclear genocide will make up for any further attempts to blow up the Seattle Spaceneedle or to set off an anthrax bomb as the Ball drops.

I wanted to take all the Chronicles out of the newspaper machine and throw them about in the busy intersection like a crazy man. I wanted to scream, “What the fuck, does anyone give a shit about this?” This over-promoted frat boy claiming to be the president is moving us closer and closer to global war that will really hurt and touch all of us in a most traumatic way.

But then I stepped back and almost laughed at myself because, hey, I ‘I'm on my way to Kate’s Kitchen. A minute before I was hoping this hot skater boy I always see at Bean There would walk by my breakfast table. That polemic contradiction of thought processes is what is so emblematic of living in the United States. Life is so painless here for so many people that we have the privilege of blindly supporting decisions that make life hell for everyone else on Earth. The thing that makes me so uneasy as I sit and write about this contradiction is that one has to assume a social system so out of equilibrium cant just continue to operate smoothly. I fear that the layers of oppression that are spit out by Western capitalist hegemony are digging a grave for us all.

I reflected over my coffee on my own situation in the American workforce, and compared it to that facing those who grow my food and make my clothes and other consumer goods. I then thought about Bush’s showboating, and just choked on the disconnect. Tomorrow I will fly my first trip as a Flight Attendant for bankrupt United Airlines. Our management will be going to Federal Court in the coming weeks to move that our Flight Attendant contract be dissolved, and that provisions be made to erase sixty years of gains in our standard of living won by our Union. Paying us an average of thirty thousand dollars per year is just too high fallutin’ for our nouveaux pauper airline. The judge will likely allow United to cut my pay and benefits so my work will be cheapened to pay for the airline’s failed business ventures and multi-million dollar executive salaries. The handwriting is on the wall that Wal-Mart is the new model for American employment, as it pays its primarily poor women workforce an average of $10,900 dollars per year for full time work with no medical or retirement benefits. Living wage work has no place in the new streamlined capitalist marketplace. Now a federal court judge selected by the President who was himself selected by a federal court will likely rule to convert my worklife to mirror that under our Uncle Sam Walton.

Just when I think the world can’t be more ruthless, I think about a Wall Street Journal cover story I read last week about the World Bank and agricultural production in Ghana. This may seem like a small story from a land far, far away, but I think it illustrates American and Western greed and power on a Herculean scale. The World Bank is a lender set up and funded by industrialized countries to oversee development in what used to be termed the Third World. The auspices of the organization are to grant loans to alleviate hunger and poverty in many struggling nations. But this supposed charity operates instead as the ultimate agent of exploitation. It turns out the World Bank is trying to force the government of Ghana to stop loaning people money top buy seeds and fertilizer to grow food. The World Bank thinks Ghanaians can buy food off the world market more cheaply than they can grow it. The space opened up in fields should go to tea and ginger production, crops which grow better in West Africa than they do in Europe or the U.S. The problem is that many Ghanaian subsistence farmers don’t have the money to buy food at market rate, leaving them no way to eat if they don’t get their government loan for food production. These people are simultaneously afraid to cultivate their fields for tea or ginger, as only the global commodities market would determine what they are paid. They are afraid to follow the path of their Kenyan or Ethiopian colleagues who have lost everything as the price of coffee, the primary East African export, has fallen to near zero. So while I am confronted as an American worker with a global economic system that says I no longer have the right to earn a living wage, my counterparts in Ghana are confronted by the same system, except in their case it says they don’t even have the right to eat.

So when I think about this sleazy situation I can understand why I would look so crazy standing on Haight Street screaming about the President. The people who walked past the newsstand were stopping into Squat and Gobble to get a cheep cup of Ghanaian tea while I was about to fill up on bargain food in a hip restaurant. And though there is a disgusting history of slavery, exploitation, and enforced poverty within the United States, at the end of the day it will still be another beautiful night in San Francisco to many people. And it will also be a beautiful night in Ghana, but that beauty hasn’t prevented the global economy and malicious, non-representative governments from whittling away the livelihood of the people who live there. And if we continue to go about our business as our leaders threaten to commit murder, we must prepare for a similar erosion of our own reality. After all I am not inherently entitled to enough time or money to eat at Kate’s Kitchen, or to live in the peaceful, beautiful city that supports it. Generations of activists have fought for the paltry bit of fairness and justice we have in our lives, and if we don’t take up their battle, a season of despair may be in store.