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Salinas
Driving to make my pilgrimage to
Steinbeck land, I pass the valley.
Wall-to-wall carpet of lettuce,
Strawberries, and other produce
Leads the eye to the hills in the west
And the ocean to the east.
The summer heat wilts. In the fields
heavily dressed Mexicans, hoping to
Prevent the sun and pesticides from permeating
into the core of their precious, porous bodies
Appear like a mirage of moving rocks
as they care for the food that will go
On my table on the other side of this
country. When the clear plastic
Clam shells are pulled from the shelf, some-
one will mumble a complaint about the cost.
Efficiency
In a portable cubicle, in an innocuous
office building not large enough
to hold humanity’s dreams, someone
has been tasked to lead a team
to study how to increase operational
efficiencies and improve
the bottom line. In effect:
to exchange the beating heart
for a robot or an application.
Since machines never need
to vacation or sleep, which
senior management sees
ss a plus. This also will increase
the speed of products getting to
market faster, which consumers demand.
They pour over the ratio of capital
investment to reduce jobs. The days
of lifetime employment are gone.
What should any employee expect,
the team reasons, this is capitalism,
not people-ism. It is the natural evolution
of a concept, like the Information Age,
The Industrial Age, or Darwinism
where the rich fatten the poor
Before they eat them.
