Sin-eaters.

Lots of scorn towards mere employees, not a lot towards the CEOs of the banks doing the foreclosures. Fighting the system that makes the work necessary might mean doing things that are inconvenient (like being a militant, or worse, a revolutionary), whereas hating on the little people who have to do the work is easy and doesn’t necessitate that ones gets off their chair.

Don’t hate the playa, hate the game.

yes yes yes on the sin-eaters reference; spot on

Yeah, hate the clean up crew cleaning up after your neighbors. They wouldn’t be there if your neighbor hadn’t lost his job. So maybe hate on their boss instead?

Going even farther, if your neighbor maybe hadn’t trashed the house (like many do) when they got foreclosed on, the cleaning crew might not have to be there.

Oh, and they are VERY wise to carry a gun to protect themselves. Even if the property is foreclosed on, the old owner (or someone else) may be squatting there. An unfortunate fact of life here in Socal.

The people who do the hard work remind us of our failings, both personal and societal, and we scorn them for that reminder.

There’s also a dose of fear in there, fear that we’re all one illness or layoff away from losing our own homes and how violated we’d feel if someone went into what we considered our’s and cleared our stuff away.

It seems like the letter writers don’t believe you can be a good person without constantly wringing your hands over the misfortunes of others.  I’m all for a little hand-wringing from time to time but there is a limit to how much useless worrying one can do on a day to day basis.

do they do lawns? i’ve been mowing my girlfriend’s neighbor’s lawn for most of the summer due to it being foreclosed on.  i also park in the driveway so it looks like people live there.  a few houses in the local area have had all the copper pulled out of them.  the bank has yet to put a sign up “for sale”.

Salon’s commenting crew is just misogynous, no more no less.  Guara-damn-tee you they wouldn’t have piled on the boyfriend so hard if he’d written the story.  Working man’s gotta make a living, and he’d have been praised for the bits of sensitivity in the essay.

Since they’re armed on the job, I hope their employer has given them proper training in the defensive use of firearms. If not, they’ve got a boss we should really hate.

Lots of scorn towards mere employees, not a lot towards the CEOs of the banks doing the foreclosures.

I see this as a major cultural problem that transcends not only the mortgage industry, but employees of corporate America as a whole.

In my life, I have been a peon bottom-rung employee for several companies that I am not a huge fan of… Starbucks Coffee, Verizon Communications, and Citibank to name a few.  None of these jobs were “dream jobs”, and I wasn’t thrilled with the idea of having to work for companies whose practices often disgusted me.  But I had to eat.  And that’s a fact for a ton of people who take low-paying jobs for these companies… they aren’t the enemy, but they often get treated like the enemy because of who their employer is.  I remember taking heat from some of my liberal friends because of who my employer was at the time.

I remember one friend who was particularly scathing in her criticism towards me when I worked for Citibank (Citimortgage, specifically) several years ago.  This friend was a grad student in an arts program.  This friend didn’t work.  This friend had rich parents and a fairly large trust fund and didn’t have to work, but instead got to sit around all day making hemp necklaces, playing around in drum circles, and organizing peace marches and whatnot.

Not that I have a problem with any of that stuff… I love drum circles and peace marches.  And if I had a huge amount of money in the bank from my parents’ wealth that enabled me to sit around playing in drum circles on a Tuesday afternoon, I’d probably do that, or something similar.

But I’d like to think I wouldn’t chastise my other less fortunate friends who had to work to eat, even if that work was for a reviled entity of corporate America.

And having worked in a call center for Verizon Wireless, I will never, ever, ever again take out my anger towards a corporate behemoth that I feel is screwing me on the bottom-level customer service rep who is just trying to pay their own bills.  It’s why I have to take a breath every time I prepare to call United Healthcare to deal with my current issue with them.  Because the person answering the phone for UHC is not UHC, they’re just somebody trying to put food on the table, and they certainly aren’t getting rich off of their company’s evil practices.

The same phenomenon occurred during the farm foreclosures of the 1980’s.  I remember reading about near-riots at sheriff’s sales.

it’s interesting that it’s so easy for people to scapegoat the people who do the hard, necessary work, and don’t attack the system that makes the work necessary.

You can’t beat up the system, since it has no physical body to beat on; but you can beat up the people.  It’s an expression of powerlessness and frustration.  And fear that it might happen to you.

People on both sides of the immigration issue do this to immigrants working in low-skill, low-wage jobs.  The nativists characterize them as human vermin, while still patronizing businesses who hire them and taking advantage of the cheap labor they provide.  Pro-immigration people romanticize their poverty and praise their work ethic and resilience (which is really a form of condescension).

At the risk of being a contrarian, how would evil get done if people refused to do evil work. Executioners, foreclosure police and enforcers, hitmen, unethical lawyers. If we all made definitive stands on what we would not do even for money, it becomes that much harder for the CEOs, law and order sadists, etc… to “win”.

See (was it) Chicago when the police said fuck enforcing foreclosures, because they knew the system was broken and that the banks were pretty much using our money to steal our homes when we were down.

I wouldn’t be quite as virulent personally to these predators, but they decided to support the rancid power structure and provide the “needed” role for exploitation. They are partially culpable for that just as lawyers as partially culpable when they “play the game” instead of standing up for rule of law and humanity.

The powerbrokers have power, but they can only use us to wield it. So little sympathy for their plight. they knew what they were getting into when they supported evil.

Lindsay Beyerstein, did you read the article? The writer’s boyfriend is the boss and they both have concealed carry permits. They’re not walking around with a shoulder-holster - they keep the gun in the truck.

To my comment above, what I’m trying to get at is the banality of evil.

Totally and completely off topic but WHAT. THE. FUCK.  http://thinkprogress.org/2009/09/30/derbyshire-female-suffrage/

See (was it) Chicago when the police said fuck enforcing foreclosures, because they knew the system was broken and that the banks were pretty much using our money to steal our homes when we were down.

That was Tom Dart.  Landlords were not paying their mortgages and when their buildings were foreclosed upon, the tenants were out on the street, often with no notice.  They’d been paying their rent, but the landlord had pocketed it and not paid the mortgage or warned anyone that the property was in foreclosure.

Dart refused to enforce any more evictions until the banks notified the residents, be they only lowly tenants, that their properties were under foreclosure.  The banks had all the info, but they were using the police to do their work.  The banks screamed about it, threatened to sue, and then agreed to give tenants at least 30 days’ notice.  Seems to me that if the buildings were located in Chicago, there may very well be an issue with the tenant landlord ordinance here, plus the need for new owners to honor leases already in place.  Informing the tenants of foreclosure is actually good business, if you’re not too entitled to think of it.

anyway, Dart went back to evicting people again.  The whole ‘eviction boycott’ barely lasted a week.

What’s not clear from the article at all is how much of the work is evicting and how much is cleaning up. The cleaning up sounds very matter-of-fact and even a good thing, but the having a concealed carry permit and telling people that you have paperwork telling them to get out of their house right now part seems like it could be problematic.

It’s all well and good to “boycott” jobs for companies with bad practices, but when you’ve got bills to pay somehow those ideals seem a little less important. And companies know that there are, especially now, a lot of people who are desperate for an income. They take advantage of their employees as surely as they do their customers.

Heh after being characterized as “someone who would inflict disease on everyone” for not getting an H1N1 shot (I would rather the elderly, infirm, children and healthcare workers get theirs first - there is only about 42 million doses anyhow for Oct. and I’m a healthy adult with a functioning immune system - I’m last in line IMHO) I will never be shocked at how quickly people on the internet will jump to judge.

Still. Jeeziz. Find a hobby or look at pictures of fluffy kittens or something people.
OR, howabout going after the Wall Street assholes who made all this wonderful stuff possible? No? Too hard to go after the real problem?

See (was it) Chicago when the police said fuck enforcing foreclosures, because they knew the system was broken and that the banks were pretty much using our money to steal our homes when we were down.

That wasn’t just Chicago, that was all of Cook County.  Sheriff Tom Dart was the person who made the call to stop the foreclosures, and he did it mainly because a ton of completely innocent renters were getting tossed out of rental properties where absentee landlords had defaulted on the mortgages for the properties.  The renters had done literally nothing at all wrong - in almost every case, their rent was entirely paid up to date, and they had been given no warning by their landlords that the property was about to be foreclosed.  They were getting royally screwed, not just by the banks who didn’t care that their rent was paid up, but by shitty landlords who hadn’t bothered to notify them that they had let the mortgage go under.

Dart was a hero for taking that action, and his decision was a big enough story that he was named by TIME as one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World” in 2009.

“Lots of scorn towards mere employees, not a lot towards the CEOs of the banks doing the foreclosures.”

In fairness most of us don’t come across the CEOs in real life but we do come across the people they employ. Sure they are all in a bind, they need the paycheck to pay bills and its not like you can quit your job because it turns out you work for a psychopath but it doesn’t make what they are doing ok.
Its sort of a silly libertarian position to claim that if you don’t like what your employer is doing you can quit but at the same time if you do work at scumbag corporation number 257 you have sort of accepted that you will do bad things to other people or at the very least you are in some way complicit with bad things being done to other people. In detroit you might not be the one of the guys that tosses families out on the street so that their house can be bulldozed for a gentrification project but if you work in that company’s office ordering building materials or making sure that the thugs are paid on time you are in some way responsible.

And that’s the thing its only people who are partially responsible that are close to us in real life. What’s the point in being pissed at the CEO, you may as well be angry at clouds that surround the chalet he owns in Switzerland. Your anger will never encounter its object. Martha and Jim who work at haliburton whom you meet when buying milk are part of the company that employs them and they are in some way responsible. They might rationalize that if it wasn’t them it would only be someone else but I don’t really think that works because they were involved. So I think its rational to be angry with people who are involved but it is qualified anger because they were not entirely free agents and people sometimes act like they were addressing Dick Cheney and not Martha and Jim.

Second the employees are the same as us. CEOs live in CEO land and they have their own bizarre reality. Anger is holding someone accountable for a wrong done to you and to be angry you have to see that what the other person did was done knowingly. There is a kind of equality in that because we hold each other accountable. In order to be at all angry at the people who do the shit jobs we have to assume they are on same level as us. Corporations don’t live in that reality and CEOs either aren’t confronted with their effects upon the world or they don’t give a shit. You can’t be angry at something that doesn’t exist in the moral universe we all live in. You can see it as an enemy or some kind of hazard but the schmucks who actually go and dump the chemical waste in the river are on our level and we can say “you are making things worse for everyone please stop doing it”. The only way to get a corporation or a CEO to behave is with laws and you don’t make those in anger. Or at least you shouldn’t. 

The house cleaning crew are the last people anyone should really be annoyed at though. Not cleaning the house doesn’t mean the previous occupants get to stay there. That ship has sailed. Unless society decides to let them go derelict something has to be done with them.

Salon’s commenting crew is just misogynous, no more no less.

That, and more trigger-happy than Pandagonians on high-caffeine days.  I haven’t been able to read their comments (and most articles, now, sigh), for some time.  I used to love that site back in their prime. 

Is it worth revisiting?  Are they getting back on track?

Going even farther, if your neighbor maybe hadn’t trashed the house (like many do) when they got foreclosed on, the cleaning crew might not have to be there.

Many times people just up and walk away from those homes, even if they’re not trashed, and the cleaning crew has to come in and throw out furniture, electronics, baby photos.  And even the most conscientious formers owners likely wouldn’t have cleaned the place well enough for it to be put on the market.

What’s really amazing is when banks pay someone to paint a dead lawn green.

But I had to eat.  And that’s a fact for a ton of people who take low-paying jobs for these companies… they aren’t the enemy, but they often get treated like the enemy because of who their employer is.

I have sympathy for most peons, since I’ve been one myself, but I loathe collections agents.  It’s not just whom they work for; it’s what they have to do for that job—harass people in debt and tell them they’re scum.  I had to deal with those bastards many times as a kid and I’ll never forget the guy (who sounded white and middle class) who told me that he felt sorry for me that I had such a worthless mother.

The house next to me foreclosed.  It sat empty for over a year, doors swinging in the breeze, trash building up on the “lawn”, which rapidly turned into a massive weed pit.  A branch came down on a power line and just stayed there.  A hole developed in the foundation.  Meanwhile, I’m fixing up my house to sell, wondering how much of a hit my property value was taking.  When the bank finally sent someone out to mow the law and clean up the place, I wanted to kiss the guy. 

Don’t hate on the people cleaning up the house.  They’re quite possibly saving your neighborhood.

At the risk of being a contrarian, how would evil get done if people refused to do evil work.

Like most people, I believe my right not to starve trumps yours. When it comes to that basic fundamental thing, most people aren’t altruists and aren’t willing to starve for principles, except maybe if it’s for a close relative or someone you love. A lot.

You can’t fault people for following their self-interests (as glibertarian as that might make me sound). You can only fault a system which is designed to make people self-interest run counter to the greater good.

I’m not sure how it works with forclosures, but in Texas you have to get a legal writ from a judge to sieze property from an apartment. A representative of law enforcement must be present. property siezed must be cataloged and an attempt must be made to locate the tennant to let them know where the property is being stored.

Seems ex-homeowners have fewer rights.

I’m not thrilled about the anti-union practices and business model of the company I am now working for (think smiley faces). I need that whole $9.25 an hour to pay my bills and feed my kids. Necessity trumps any feelings I have about contributing to said practices.

Besides, SOMEONE has to bake those doughnuts the more affluent set grab on the way to work, right? We can’t all be CEO’s.

As someone who has toured many a bank owned home (back when I thought we’d actually get a tiny loan to buy one) can I say thank gawd for the cleaning crew? Ever toured a house that’s had multiple pets pee every inch of the carpet? Not pleasant!

Sometimes the bank is too cheap to put a lock on the doors, which means that not only did the owners trash the place, the neighborhood gets in on the act.  Then you’re living next to a house that won’t sell because the living room is littered with beer cans (and worse!).  Maybe it’s not a high end neighborhood to begin with, and that vacant trashed house starts dragging your quiet, but poor, little street down.

Better to have someone come in, clean it up, lock it up, and maybe maintain the yard so that the place sells promptly.  Unree is correct, if the boyfriend had written this, he’d probably be hailed as a hero to property values everywhere.

I love drum circles ...

Psssst!  DTG in STL is worse than Hitler.  Pass it on!

Cerebus, I disagree.  Without a clean-up crew, all that would happen is the bank would run the squatters out and then the house would fall to shit.  And that is bad for everyone.  No one benefits from empty, rotting houses.  The banks are already sitting on top of exponentially more foreclosed houses than they can take care of, and we’re seeing how it hurts everyone else. 

Our economy is already in the tank, but if forced banks to just forgive all the debt for everyone who can’t pay their mortgages, the system would collapse.

Not that the banks are innocent.  They should have set up a program to rewrite the loans so they were more affordable, so they can keep them on the books as an income generator, and people can keep their houses.  But this is not the fault of the clean-up crews, and clean-up crews refusing to do their jobs wouldn’t change this.

Cleaning up foreclosed upon houses isn’t evil work, and it’s messed up to think that it is.

keshmeshi:

I loathe collections agents.  It’s not just whom they work for; it’s what they have to do for that job—harass people in debt and tell them they’re scum.

QFT, thrice.

“Like most people, I believe my right not to starve trumps yours. When it comes to that basic fundamental thing, most people aren’t altruists and aren’t willing to starve for principles, except maybe if it’s for a close relative or someone you love. A lot.”

Agreed in general, as long as youre not scabbing

Who’s to blame for this royal mess we call an economy?

Where do I begin?

Ronald Reagan and his policies of ‘let’s make war on unions’ and ‘let’s shovel money at the rich, so they’ll create new jobs.’ Thus began the long reversal of the postwar income compression, when the bottom gained more than the top.

Alan Greenspan and Phil Gramm who pushed for and cheerled the deregulation of financial markets.

The geniuses on Wall Street who created ‘new and innovative financial instruments’ that pushed the market over a cliff.

East Asian governments that entered into an implicit bargain to buy US Treasuries (keeping interest rates artificially low) so that they could continue selling us their goods.

You and I and our addiction to cheap oil and thus created our whole mall/condo/suburban living arrangements, the greatest misallocation of resources ever.

So, yeah, let’s blame a few folks at the bottom of the food chain for shitty decisions made higher up, not to mention the self-absolution it provides the rest of us.

Yeah, I get pissed when a bank lets a property languish.  It’s a real blight on the community, and we shouldn’t let them get away with it.

Ranyit @ 24: Barely, and no.

Oh, and they are VERY wise to carry a gun to protect themselves. Even if the property is foreclosed on, the old owner (or someone else) may be squatting there. An unfortunate fact of life here in Socal.

Okay, I know people who’ve been beat up just for trying to find somewhere to sleep out of the cold. The idea of people carrying guns in case of squatters totally sketches me out. I get that they’re just doing their jobs and they’re propably decent people, but it still scares me because that’s the sort of situation where someone might see something they think is threatening when really the squatter’s just trying to get out of there.

“Decay in buildings is every bit as inevitable as mortality in humans.”
Jonathan Meades in “Salisbury Cathedral”, (Youtube at 4 of 6, et seq.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9RiQUX2Grs&feature=PlayList&p=762CD035D94AA552&index=4

Thanks for those who responded. Yeah, I see now how clean-up people are pretty innocuous and even a good thing.

And blackbloc, you’re right on not starving.

I do hate however how thanks to the looting of the safety net we have this system of economic terrorism where the powerful get to betray our principles and force us to aid and abet systemic evil at the threat of starvation, eviction and death. Denmark may not be flawless, but I do appreciate how in general they provide a large safety net so that you can survive, feed yourself and your family, and pay for adequate shelter without betraying a single principle. We really need something similar in America, though for the reasons I note, that would be an impossibility. Helping people is socialist, etc…

I think I agree with many on why the anger gets shifted the way it does. Systemic problems, CEOs who carefully insulate themselves from people and political systems that try and diffuse and bypass calls for systemic reformation make the available options for protesting that stuff rather limited. If you have enough privilege you can boycott evil work or evil companies, but no matter what you agitate those in power won’t hear it, so it can simply be a release to rant at the cog in the machine to feel like you’re not just spinning in the dust as everything falls apart.

It’s naive, unworkable, and not a good idea because of the economic terrorism, but to paraphrase an interview with George Carlin, it would be amazing if a job boycott happened and people did refuse evil work. People like to displace their stuff away from them, using economic desperation to convince people to take the ugly heartless jobs. If we did have the power to refuse, then it would be harder for them to play sideline cheerleader to human suffering. It’s unfair to the people it happens to and the people forced in the job who get to be pawns for some nasty agenda of profiting on death and suffering.

But then, if we had that power, then labor would have had enough power in this country that these shit jobs would have been impossible to create in the first place. Sigh.

And that is bad for everyone.  No one benefits from empty, rotting houses.

Oh, somewhere, somehow, there’s a financial manipulator making money off it.  Possibly by buying the things or their mortgages at true price (i.e. shit) and borrowing on them on their nominal value.  or doing this with their neighbours, when the people lending aren’t aware that the neighbourhood as a whole are going to shit…

You and I and our addiction to cheap oil and thus created our whole mall/condo/suburban living arrangements, the greatest misallocation of resources ever.
YES.

I’ll use Wal-Mart as an example of where anger often gets misapplied.

Yes, Wal-Mart is a pretty fucking evil company, and yes, anger towards the company is wholly justified.

But for some small rural communities, Wal-Mart is like crack for a crack addict.

When Wal-Mart moves into Bumfuck, Kansas and builds a massive Supercenter, this typically drives most of the local small mom and pop stores out of business.  It often hits local grocery stores the worst.

So all of these people who used to work at the mom and pop shops are now forced to accept employment at Wal-Mart, typically at far lower compensation than they were making before.  Also, when every affordable grocery gets driven out of town by a Wal-Mart Supercenter, most townspeople usually have no choice but to buy their food from Wal-Mart, unless they happen to be farmers.

But see, we demonize people who shop at Wal-Mart, right?  Only bad people would patronize such an evil empire, right?

I don’t shop at Wal-Mart, ever.  I also have the privilege of living in a major U.S. metropolitan area, and I have plenty of other places to shop at besides Wal-Mart.  Hell, I can shop at Target, because they aren’t corporate at all!! I love how so many conscious hipsters have decided that because Target is less guilty of the corporate evil that Wal-Mart epitomizes, they must therefore not be guilty at all.  And I say that as an occasional Target shopper… I do like them and prefer shopping there over Wal-Mart, but I don’t delude myself into thinking that giving my money to Target is gonna help destroy the evils of Big Boxes… because Target is a Big Box, too.  Just not as big as Wal-Mart.

The fact is, if you live in Bumfuck, Kansas, you may have no choice but to shop at Wal-Mart for some of your necessities.  And it doesn’t make you an evil bastard.  Nor does it mean you are a traitor to progressive ideology.  Not everyone who shops at Wal-Mart does so because they enjoy enabling an evil behemoth retail giant.  Some do so because they would prefer not to starve.

I own a car.  Over the past few years, I’ve tried to become a lot more conscious about how and when I use my car versus other modes of transportation, and cut down on my driving dramatically where I can.  Still, there are times when not using my car is not an option.  My car requires gasoline to run.  I must purchase this gas from an entity that is making money off of raping the earth.  I’m sure in my life, Exxon-Mobil has raked in thousands of dollars from my patronage, and as such, I’ve contributed DIRECTLY to their profits and thus enabled their corporate evil.

I guess my point is, even the most progressive people I know are typically forced to make bargains with evil corporate empires almost everyday in their lives, whether they want to or not.  Particularly if you live in America, a country that is essentially run by corporations.

And if you are employed in America, I’m guessing the odds are extremely strong that you are either employed by a corporation, or you are employed by an entity that depends on the machinations of corporations for its existence.

We can’t all be horrible people just because we happen to live in a society run by greedy fucks.

Interestingly, this came up earlier this week. A friend of mine who lost her job (for not telling a boss his stupid ideas were good) has possibly got the opportunity to do foreclosure cleanups to make ends meet. And she was feeling weird about the idea, that it didn’t feel right to profit from someone else’s hardship.

I was foreclosed on last year. We knew it was coming and moved in advance, but we couldn’t take or sell everything. We left behind a lot of things like gardening tools that we wouldn’t need as renters, hoping that at least whoever got the home could make good use of them.

I told my friend that my view on it is at least some good can come out of bad, if someone gets paid to fix up the place. I hope someone’s eating the apples from the apple tree we planted, and enjoying the rose bushes we put in. Just because our lives went weird doesn’t mean someone else shouldn’t make use of what we can’t. Be a damn stupid world if everyone tried to leave nothing for others to benefit from.

Samantha, that’s so sweet. I hope that if, God forbid, the hammer falls on me, I can bear it with half that much grace.

I’m always fascinated by what I’d call the executioner role in society.  It’s the role of someone who is doing a job that the given society has decided must be done, but then we blame and hate the people who actually do it.  It’s why executioners supposedly wore hoods—-concealing their identity so they wouldn’t face the blowback from doing a job that society deemed necessary.  Nowadays we hate on lawyers and politicians, even as we need them.

Lawyers, politicians, and abortionists.  Think about it.  Middle-class society literally will not work without abortionists around to help make it run, because the amount of sex necessary to get a man and a woman to bond also produces more babies than they can raise (even if they stick close together) to a middle-class standard of life.  Yet there exist entire organizations essentially dedicated to no other purpose than to the grooming of assassins of abortionists.

The persecution of abortionists is a specialty of the right wing.  As such, it provides a couple of interesting clues to rightie priorities.  Right-wingers know as well as anybody that there’s absolutely no way to preserve a middle-class standard of life within/among a group in which all the women produce all the babies they’re capable of having.  At the very least, somebody somewhere will have to take up the slack: either people who are better off than the parents or the group they belong to will have to do it, or people who are worse off than the parents or the group they belong to will have to do it, or some other sector of suburbia will have to do it, or (insert alternative).  At most, the emphasis on fertility at the expense of sustainability lets a person know that maybe righties don’t consider the perpetuation of the middle class as a sine qua non. 

The other clue to rightie priorities is to be found in the rightie insistence that people in general and women in particular “pay the price” for having had sex.  It’s easy to see that the specific type of sex they want people to pay the price for is heterosexual intercourse, because that’s they only kind of sex which brings about the “price” in question: it’s the only type of sex which produces babies.  Now, why would you want to penalize heterosexual intercourse to the exclusion of all other types of sex, especially when you’re busy insisting that heterosexual intercourse is the only “real” or justified kind of sex there is?  IMO the answer is that righties know (again, as well as anyone) that sex is one of the major ways in which people bond with each other, and that if it turns into a problem or a serious source of stress, they’ll either quit bonding over it or won’t bond over it to as great an extent.  Heterosex by definition happens between men and women.  If you turn heterosexual intercourse into a threat loaded with danger-potential, you weaken the likelihood that men and women will bond.

IMO “women’s work” as a whole is part of the “scapegoated” category.*  Women’s work is work which has to be done by somebody to keep society running but which the surrounding culture has deprived of human dignity and has decided to treat as a badge of humiliation.  It’s work which by nature doesn’t lead up to a big finale, which involves too much massaging of other people’s egos, and is too much implicated in the cleaning-up of other people’s messes.  It’s interesting that the Salon contributors who wrote the article are, basically, housecleaners, even if they do have to take a gun to work.  No wonder so many Salon commentators reacted unkindly to them: who feels the need to be polite to a janitor?  And a janitor who carries a gun around is plain out of bounds.

*Lots of men end up doing “women’s work”, and they get disrespected for it.  I’d like to see that change, because it’s an attitude which carries with it loads of disadvantages.  If you think that politicians are non-manly and are doing women’s work because they spend lots of time buttering others up and massagng the egos of strangers, you’re more likely to decide that politics is an inadequate means of solving problems and to want to go straight to force.  If you think that lawyers are non-manly and are doing women’s work because they rack up hours schmoozing on the phone, you’re more likely to fall into a frame of mind in which it seems to you that the right thing to do when you’re wounded by the world is to shoot first and ask questions later.  And so forth.

I have a job that’s related to foreclosures, in a different way.  I take out the notices and either give them to someone and explain them, or post them on the door.  I have taken notices to a lot of tenants who didn’t know the house was in foreclosure, and are glad to have the heads-up.  I have seen a lot of houses where the occupant obviously gave up on the moving and left the last load or two behind.  I have seen abandoned houses, where the owner just closed the door and walked away.  Every case is a tragedy of one kind or another, but I have not yet gotten hardened.  It’s not “just a job” to me.  It’s an unfortunate but necessary part of the system of buying, borrowing on, selling, houses.

I try to do good whenever I can.  But there are some people who can’t imagine that my job is anything but evil.  A friend of my husband said that I must be very mean, because I enjoyed putting people out of their homes.  But I am part of the “due process of law”, which says that if an action of law is likely to affect you adversely, you are entitled to be informed about it, if possible by a real live human being.

As for cleaning up “trashed” houses, I have never actually seen a trashed house—unless you count the ones college students have been living in.  But every house that is vacated for any reason is cleaned before it is made available for the next occupant—even if the last occupant left it spick and span.  (Cleaning deposit, remember?)  There have always been crews who clean vacated houses.

And the people who are concerned about the effect on the neighborhood are exactly right.  The better it looks, the more likely it is to stay looking good.  Houses and neighborhoods both.

I think there might be two different attitudes at work here, and not at the same time or in the same commenters:

One is a kind of moral absolutism: I regard a thing as bad, so I will regard all aiding, abetting and enabling this thing as bad. If people who get rich on the misery of others would have to do their own dirty work, less of it might be done. Problem with it, unless someone walks the walk on this, their talking the talk has them demand sacrifices of others that they themselves are too privileged to have to conisder. One of the most insidious things an evil system does is to make accomplices out of those who gain least from it.

The other attitude comes from being ambivalent about the value of something. I want an economic system where foreclosures happen, but I do not want them to happen to me. So I regard the impersonal as acceptable, and the personal as unacceptable. As the poor grunt who does the dirty work is more easily regarded as a person than “the bank”, it’s the grunt who gets the hate and the bank that gets the respect.

DTG #11: It’s why I have to take a breath every time I prepare to call United Healthcare to deal with my current issue with them.  Because the person answering the phone for UHC is not UHC, they’re just somebody trying to put food on the table,

Yes, it’s pretty much the people responsible hiding behind a human shield of wage slaves so they never have to actually acknowledge anyone they have hurt.

Older #49: A lot of the “trashed” effect probably comes from efficiency in packing. If you have limited time, money, and storage space, you pick up what you can carry and leave the rest where it falls. Add some weeks’ worth of dust, and it looks as if the MacMessies just fled the country.

One is a kind of moral absolutism: I regard a thing as bad, so I will regard all aiding, abetting and enabling this thing as bad. If people who get rich on the misery of others would have to do their own dirty work, less of it might be done. Problem with it, unless someone walks the walk on this, their talking the talk has them demand sacrifices of others that they themselves are too privileged to have to conisder. One of the most insidious things an evil system does is to make accomplices out of those who gain least from it.

Well said inge. I have to say that after going through a professional testing RE: my job (institutional review board) and the ethics of human research there is so much to consider with the concept of free will not just in medical trials but in things like this.
Some will take it to the extreme and say “There’s NO free will if THIS happens!” or “Your concept of taking care of yourself is bad because it might possibly, sometime, maybe injure someone else!” etc. etc.
I’m not making any sort of statement here - just letting my brain wander about a bit with what you’ve said.