AMERICAN RED CROSS APOLOGIZES FOR “SUPER RACIST” SAFETY POSTER

I Met Another Lunatic Yesterday.

He told me a whale of a story about the Red Cross.

Really, I am thinking that may be a good title for a blog about traveling to the “big town” of Cape Girardeau to do business that requires a population of more than 234 people.

I have company coming from the East Coast for a few days, bringing their 14 year old daughter and a friend to see the “real” countryside of the interior United States (while they can.) If you have ever seen the movie Raising Arizona with Nicholas Cage and Holly Hunter, think of Holly Hunter telling Hi’s prison buddies they needed to leave because they had “DECENT” friends coming over.

Since one of the big dogs has been ill and requires a LOT of inside time out of the heat to recoup our investment into his health (He will need to save both of us from cougars or wolves in the near future to make the cost of his emergency veterinary treatment worthwhile), I decided a clipping of Pyrenese hair was in order.

While they were being shorn (see images below) of their fur and I discovered the rescue J-dawg is really in the witness protection program from Cruella DeVille, I decided to go thrift-shopping because I always am in the market for rabbit cages and pens because now that I’ve figured out how to generate little bunnies without the doe tossing them out, I seem to have a need for small cages where little rabbits can fatten up for a few weeks happily without being eaten by hawks or getting too much exercise.

It just so happens that the Goodwill store in Cape Girardeau is beside a Tobacco shop specializing in pipe tobacco and cigars. I don’t know about you, but I LOVE the smell of really good tobacco, finely cured with some wonderful aromatic blend of flavors. So, I wandered into the shop and got some pipe cleaners, which used to be decent when you bought them at Wally World but are now just CRAP unless you get “real” quality pipe cleaners. They are so handy to have for so many reasons when you have small animal cages to deal with.

While there, I saw that there were an assortment of what I call One Hitter Pipes on the counter and while Missouri has not legalized pot, selling a pipe that might be used for smoking an illegal substance is NOT illegal. But many people think, myself included, that the only holdup with legalizing pot everywhere is the government not yet having control on the growing and selling of the product.

I mentioned that I had quit smoking a decade ago, but had never come to dislike the smell of tobacco. I pointed to the little pipes on the counter which were adorably and weirdly shaped like the heads of little animals (a one hit pipe in a “head” pipe) with their mouths open to hold the “smoke” and an elongated neck to take a toke from. I made the comment to no one in particular that in twenty years, after marijuana is legal and taxed for every use possible, you will have lawsuits against the big marijuana growers licensed by the USDA to grow marijuana and distribute it. The marijuana will be cancer causing and have severe detrimental affects on health.

Because it will be cured and packaged with all the chemicals that Big Tobacco put into packages of cigarettes.

I was almost out the door when I met the lunatic. He was sitting in a chair at a table in the corner smoking with another man who had just purchased a wonderful smelling cigar. As I passed by, he said “It almost sounds like you don’t care much for government regulations.”

That evolved into a discussion about his filing several lawsuits against his employer, the American Red Cross, that very day. He claimed that the discriminatory practices within the Red Cross were beyond criminal and that if people knew what kind of egomaniacs were in charge there, they would never donate one drop of blood.

I talked to him quite a while and shared my own experience at filing a lawsuit against a “big name” military industrial complex giant for corrupt management practices. I have no doubt at all that every single thing he told me is true. Not one.

But, I also have no doubt that once it is investigated by the people who will be sent down from the several agencies to whom he’s reported, he will be given some sort of severance package from the Red Cross with a tidy amount of dollars and will have to sign a Nondisclosure agreement to finalize the settlement.

I told him, honestly, that I thought he would win. But I told him that they would not lose. Even if the most qualified investigator comes from the NLRB or any one of the other alphabet soup agencies to resolve his grievance and that investigator uncovers a freezer full of tainted blood mis-marked for delivery to the U.S. Army, that investigator will eventually bump elbows with someone who knows somebody in D.C. That person in D.C. will call their personal friends on the staff of so-and-so in Congress and pretty soon, his investigator(s) will not be quite as indignant about what they have uncovered as they were. They have families too.

When I got suspended as a union steward for “insubordination” to an idiot manager who Replied to All on an email message concerning a manager’s calling my black friend a little monkey being out of line and needing corrective action by the company. Instead of simply acknowledging my threat that if they didn’t do something about the harassment of my coworker who was also my friend, then I would, they decided to double down and the idiot manager sent his cutesy observation to “All” that “Hey, so and so… Look at what the Bitch is doing NOW!” I immediately replied with a Thank You for providing me additional evidence of the hostile work environment and the next week I was suspended.

But not before I had filed charges with the NLRB and it was ON like DONKEY KONG.

Haha… it was a stressful year for us and in the end, as I said, I stood on principle, spoke truth to power and when the smoke cleared, I worked at a different place and got several thousands in back pay for the effort.

However, what I told the lunatic at the tobacco shop to think about was this:

In spite of standing up for what was right and proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that the practices of that company were corrupt and wrong by U.S. labor standards, not one thing there changed except I went to work elsewhere.

That company still has the contract and still has access to the public moneys as if they were given a key to the back gate of the vault. As a matter of fact, if you drive out the back gate of Tinker AFB in Oklahoma City, you will see that they OWN the back gate of the vault.

The Red Cross is a powerful corporation. Think about it. How many companies are there that almost have the same diplomatic status as a country?