Immediate and gaping availability.

Urgently, desperately hiring.

Here at Tidings of Magpies, we like the game of dreaming up imaginary jobs. We like to conjure up a world where the skills we believe are truly important are valued and rewarded. Skills like creativity, kindness, empathy, imagination, hopefulness. (Yes there are plenty of actual jobs for which those skills are necessary but we would argue it’s still a stretch to imagine they are valued as much as they should be.)

We are utterly dismayed to learn that the current administration is playing the game of imaginary jobs, too — horrifically. They’re playing it with nightmare tactics and fiendish intent. The bullies have stolen our ball and they are using it to scare people and hurt people. They are using it to kill people. And because the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity, because we’ve had our eye off that ball for so long that a sickening network of corrosive poisonous vines has entangled us to the point that we can’t act or move or think or speak, we feel powerless to stop them. Which is a bully’s best tactic. And because they have all the actual, financial, legal, and political power, their nightmarish imaginary jobs aren’t imaginary anymore. They are now ludicrously “real” jobs, and people are really suffering and dying.

In their ridiculous Department of General Evil, they pretend to work as accountants so they can carry out a self-serving smash-and-grab operation that is so transparent that it makes fools of us all. Rich white men getting richer. As it is now, so has it always been, but this is shamelessly blatant on a sickening new level.

So we’re going to counter that by spreading an appeal for someone to work as a morality accountant, someone to hold the bullies accountable for their actions. To tally up the immoral acts and to make them face a reckoning. We are urgently hiring.

The qualifications for the job might seem simple, innate, even. All you need is a functioning moral compass, the courage of your convictions, the ability to see what is happening right before your eyes caused by people who are making no attempt to hide it, and enough resolve to do something about it. You need a sense of decency, and the strength to call out the people who don’t have a shred of that. You need some level of the aforementioned actual financial legal political power. Probably quite a lot of that. So, I hate to say it, but we might be looking for a Republican for this job. Sigh. We’ll be looking for a long time, as they have so far shown themselves to be selfish, greedy, spineless and subservient. I fear everything will be ended by the time we find the right candidate for this job.

This is a gaping, aching, wide-open hole in the fabric of our shared community, our democracy (for what it’s worth), our decency, and the history and future of our country. There must be someone who can step up to mend this tear in our cloth. There must be someone who can at least try to fix this.