Words Matter, Swap Envy for Respect, Appreciation

The following passage from this opinion piece from the San Antonio Report stuck out:

“Now that we can venture back out … let’s go back to stores. Where there seems to be an Amazon or UPS truck on every block, many deliveries are using up a lot of the world’s resources. This is great for Amazon (Jeff Bezos is burning up our money going to the edge of space) and gives employment to local drivers — and to a great many underpaid, overworked warehouse workers with little to no benefits, most of them in other states.”

While much of the above passage is problematic …
– comfort with government ‘giving us permission’ to go out …
– the odd implication that 10 people driving to shops consumes less energy than 1 truck hitting 10 houses …
– the poo-pooing of employment as his heart bleeds in assumption that the conditions agreed to are horrendous …
– and no mention that many Amazon employees work here in Bexar County and San Antonio
… he makes a good point about the value of actually going out to shop.

Still, one other sentiment in the above passage belies a couple problems with society: the one about “space.”

At the risk of splitting hairs, we work to exchange our earnings for other things we want. Presumably, we do so in the most rational way: lowest price, best quality, most convenient, etc. Once we make that transaction with whomever, and we’ve traded our money for the good or service, it’s no longer ‘our money’.

Also, so what if he’s going to space! Who cares if he goes to Vegas and blows his money on gambling and prostitutes? Jeff Bezos/Amazon have done a lot of good for society as evidenced by how large they are. If they weren’t satisfying customers, they wouldn’t have attained such size!

There’s much envy inferred in such statements, a sourness about one’s own inability to achieve the same. This wouldn’t be a problem if it didn’t translate into votes for attention-hungry politicians who would love nothing more than to get into office, seize back some of “our money,” and redistribute it to a bunch of causes favored by sore folks like Mr. Brandon who couldn’t do it himself.

Will he and others get raw when Holt Truck Centers bring greater wealth to our area (see other InfuseSA post today)? Will he still be whining when regular folk can travel to space thanks to the ground laid by Bezos and Elon Musk, who literally had the resources to burn (pardon the pun) to push into that frontier?

#wordsmatter#noBSzone#noslantinformation#whatsyourbeef#bexarcounty#sanantonio#bipartisan