Have Reached Bottom. Am Digging.

In the never ending "will they? won't they?" of my job life, the newest news -- only two days old -- is that there WILL be layoffs in my department. Because the first round of layoffs, that aren't really layoffs, didn't save the hospital enough money.
Yeah. No shit, assholes. How could it? What happened is that a manager is "laid off". Meaning that they don't have their job anymore, but based on how long they've been with the institution, and what they were doing, or what they did 15 years ago, they can go down the food chain and tell some other poor schmuck that that schmuck's job is now the manager's job, and the person who really loses their paycheck is the poor schmuck, and not the manager.

Sometimes this results in the manager taking a cut in pay. Other times it doesn't. In my own department, we had managers reclassified, and theoretically demoted, but in reality, they just had their job titles changed, and the money and the power remained the same.

So how does that, how can that, save money.

Over in the PR office, Loogie, my web editor and the only person supplying content for my site, had her position eliminated. Now we are on hold for new content. Forever, no doubt.

Six years ago, when my position of graphic designer was eliminated from that office, the director told me that she had every intention of cutting Loogie, too. She told me she didn't know how or when, but that Loogie was next on the list to go.

In what is, I am certain, merely a coincidence, Loogie and I were the only two Jews. With the cuts in staff, the PR department is now white and Hispanic. Gone is the last Jew, and the last two women of color.

I'm sure it's only a coinky-dink, aren't you?

Yesterday we had another department meeting. Our VP showed us a video of some random Civil War epic. I think that it featured Jeff Daniels, hard to tell under all that bad facial hair. He was giving an inspirational talk to a group of potential Union deserters, just prior to the Battle of Gettysburg. It was supposed to motivate us to fight for the life of the hospital while at the same time throwing our jobs away to save it. He told us we had to look at the big picture, that the hospital was what we were fighting for, not our own livelihoods. Because the hospital is a representative of the greater good. We serve the uninsured and the poor. Well, I kept my mouth shut (for once and it was a fucking miracle) and didn't point out that without our jobs, we would be the poor and uninsured.

We were told to suck it up and love our jobs, and put on happy faces, because people can't think that this is a bad place to work. People shouldn't see our dirty laundry airing and choose not to come here to be healed. Dude, nobody chooses to come here, whether the worker bees are happy, shiny, smiling drones or not.

And nobody wants to wear the happy mask anymore. We don't believe in our leaders. We don't believe in our managers. We don't believe in our government, who gives us more responsibility for the county's healthcare, but cuts the dollars we're supposed to do it with.

It is, in microcosm, what happened on Tuesday. We don't care about the economy, we don't care about healthcare and education, we don't care about the future.

We care about keeping our small piece of the status quo, and fuck everyone else.

Rome is burning.