WELCOME TO DISORDOORLY
(It's pronounced “disorderly.")
A couple of years ago, I stumbled upon a photo of a peculiar door located in the UK. The door is distinctive. At first glance, it looks totally crooked. You could hear my internal tires screech to a dead halt the second I saw it. I had to stop and zoom in to see what the heck was going on. That was when the truth revealed itself: the door was cleverly designed to look this way.
I was enamored with this photo and saved it to my hard drive. When I got the idea for this blog, I created a version of the door to use as the avatar. It’s also the inspiration for the name.
We’re conditioned to accept the standard, cheap, mass-produced hollow-core doors hanging on display at Home Depot or Lowe's. This door, however, was solid and made with intent and craftsmanship. It was masterfully produced to fit the frame, yet give the appearance of being some home renovation disaster.
When I show the image of this door to others, they don’t take a step back. They immediately recoil and get upset. They will literally tell me that the door is "wrong."
Getting upset is what people do when you break the unspoken rules of ‘supposed to.’
That is the entire point of this blog. As a working-class cultural critic, I’m going to look past the standard, mass-produced scripts we’ve been trained to regurgitate. We’ve been sold a massive bill of goods about how the world works, and I want to take a hard look at all the BS. We are going to dig into the subjects that will make people uncomfortable, examine the programming that makes us punch down instead of up, and break the hive mind that keeps us fighting each other.
The door is open. Come on in.
Leave your boots on. The toilet’s backed up and we have some shit to deal with.
​​​​​​​A BIT ABOUT ME
At the end of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, Fred Rogers would sing that you’ll have things you’ll want to talk about, ending with that familiar, gentle promise: “I will, too.”
Mr. Rogers was an American icon who operated on radical empathy. He understood that when we actually learn about each other and realize our lives do not happen in a bubble, we can embrace our differences while finally seeing our similarities. That kind of empathy is exactly what working people need right now. We have been trained to judge our fellow workers, fight over scraps, and literally bully ourselves when we end up exhausted and broke. But when you step back, you realize we are all just trying to survive the exact same rigged machine.
He was right; I do have things I want to talk about. I am betting you do, too. We’ve just been too afraid to speak up.
At the start of each show, Mister Rogers always took off his work shoes and got comfortable in order to take us to the Land of Make-Believe. I asked you to leave your boots on as we step through the crooked door, because we don’t need to hop a trolley to reach the Country of Conditioning. We’re already here. It’s a messy place where we must get uncomfortable before we can ever make our way out. Also, I should give fair warning: I do not speak like Mister Rogers. Depending on the subject, I can use the word “fuck” like a comma.
I’m Jeff. The reason that crooked door resonates with me is because the reactions it gets are the exact same reactions I get when I tell my story. I’ve done the “supposed-tos.” But when my life didn’t produce the supposedly correct outcome, the answer was always that I needed to straighten up. “Straightening up” meant becoming another hollow, mass-produced door celebrated on LinkedIn.
My perspective wasn’t born out of parachuting in from privilege to observe employees’ lives. It comes from decades of attempting to play by the manufactured rules and realizing it’s a rigged carnival game. The odds of winning just never added up. However, we’re fed the illusion that they do, so we play the game and cheer for the people who somehow won the big stuffed animal, waiting for our payoff.
I started my career designing merchandise for a famous Mouse. After getting laid off during the Great Recession, I started a design business with colleagues who were cut loose alongside me. We worked hard, learned plenty, and eventually had to shut it down when it was no longer sustainable. After moving to Chicago, I made the decision to take on debt for a Northwestern Master’s program that turned out to be nothing more than a vanity degree. I was under the impression the credential would buy security. As a consolation prize, I eventually landed a job managing packaging projects for a family snack company. I walked away after two years because I refused to be micromanaged over absolute nonsense. The CEO could give King Friday a run for his money.
With bills to pay, a pulse, and the ability to pass a mouth swab drug test, I took a job at a local Amazon warehouse. I worked alongside amazing people, but two years on concrete floors wrecked my body and murdered whatever was left of my spirit. So I pivoted again, earned my commercial driver's license, and took a seat behind the wheel of a school bus. Today I drive routes for some of the sweetest special needs kids, earn better pay than Amazon, and belong to a union for the first time. My fellow drivers and aides are a wild mix of kind and wonderful people from all walks of life. 
The jobs weren’t all the same. Some treated me better than others. But moving between them made me question the same promise: follow the rules, work hard, and security will follow.
That’s what we’ll dig into here: the promises, the conditioning, and why we so often blame ourselves and one another when those promises fall apart.
Welcome to the neighborhood.

BAGGAGE
I see you brought some baggage.
It’s metaphorical. You can’t see it, but it's weighing you down and pulling you in directions you did not choose. We need to do something about that. I have been working on my own baggage for years. I am nowhere near free of it, but I am trying.
When I say "baggage," I am not talking about the kind of personal trauma you discuss on a therapist's couch. Actually, this baggage affects you in ways most therapists are completely unequipped to tackle, because it’s a feature of the system itself. You’re born with a proverbial bag and it starts getting filled almost immediately.
As we make our way through life, we are ground down and atomized by the world around us. The medical industry looks at our exhaustion and tells us we’re just broken inside. Many of the mental health diagnoses out there are just normal human reactions to being battered by a rigged economy. But instead of fixing the workplace or the society that’s crushing us, the system blames the individual. It’s a massive gift to the pharmaceutical industry, which is more than happy to sell us pills to "fix" the exact misery the corporate grind created.
We did not end up this exhausted by accident. You are not weary because you are weak or because you failed to hustle hard enough. You are tired because from the moment you were born, you were handed a sack and the culture around you got right to work packing it with fifty pounds of pure bullshit, often disguised as gold.
That baggage is full of cult-like programming. In the US, we are not taught how to think. We are taught exactly what to think. Our institutions do not educate us; they indoctrinate us to be compliant and obedient workers. We are trained to keep our heads down, memorize the scripts, and confuse mindless obedience with good character.
Here’s a simple temperature check of how our societal conditioning works: how do you feel when someone doesn't stand for the National Anthem, or when you see someone panhandling on a street corner?
When we finally clock out, we go home and turn on the TV to wind down. But think about the word they use: programming. When the announcer says we’re returning to our "regularly scheduled programming," they aren’t just talking about a lineup of shows. They are telling you exactly what they’re doing to you. They are programming the audience. They feed us the exact stories required to keep us docile, divided, and cheering for the people robbing us blind. Look at the endless parade of cop shows, or even kids' cartoons like Paw Patrol. It’s all designed to massage us into worshiping authority. The news does it, too. The advertisers pay the bills, so the advertisers get to decide what reality looks like.
I need to be up front about something before we dig in: I don’t have this all figured out. I am not writing this as some enlightened guru standing above the fray. I am in the thick of the mud right next to you. There are days when the weight of corporate and political America, the absolute lie that this rigged carnival game is the only way human beings can exist, hits me so hard it sends me into a tailspin. I still fall into the traps. I still catch myself panicking over money, feeling guilty for resting, and letting the machine convince me that I’ve made every bad move and I am a failure for not winning at a game I know is rigged. It’s a real struggle. The conditioning runs deep in my bones, too. Breaking it is a daily, exhausting fight.
In Disordoorly, we are going to unpack these bags together, and it is going to get uncomfortable. I am going to push your buttons. You will read something here and feel an immediate, defensive rage. You will feel a sudden urge to defend the exact same system that is always devising new ways to take advantage of us.
When that happens, do not brush it off. Do not close the tab. Clutch your pearls, clench your fist, or even throw a little tantrum. When you’re done, sit in that discomfort for a moment. Ask yourself where that reflex really came from and who benefits from that feeling. Think about who handed you that script, making you react that way. I guarantee defending the way things are hasn't added to your life or gotten you a damn thing in return.
I am not asking you to blindly agree with me. Push back. Bring facts, not insults. But if you're just an internet debate bro looking to get a hard-on by playing academic gotcha games, keep walking. I don't have time for that crap. Before you unload on me, ask yourself whether you’re challenging what I wrote or punishing me for questioning a script you were taught to accept. I’ve been digging into the history of our collective hive mind. As we go along, I’ll be putting it on the table so we can deconstruct it together.
Disordoorly is an invitation to drop our heavy bags on the floor and start sorting through the scripts we were trained to carry. We aren't just tossing them in the trash and walking away, magically cured. We are going to examine every script we were handed and prove that those shiny gold nuggets aren’t precious. They’re actually just painted petrified bullshit.
It is time for working people to recognize the brainwashing, stop punching sideways, and figure out how to realize our collective power.
The door is open. Let’s unpack this shit and become Disordoorly.
HATE HAS NO HOME HERE
While we’re just getting acquainted, let’s look outside the crooked door to the front yard. In a previous post, I asked you to unpack your baggage and look at the scripts you’ve been trained to carry. Well, some people don’t just carry their scripts; they plant them in the front yard for the neighbors to see. 
People use yard signs for various reasons, like to promote a business which did a good job on a project, to celebrate something like a birthday or graduation, or even to say “please buy my house.” Then there are other signs which signal who you are to the world. I have to admit I have an affinity for people who have the Proud Union Member signs in their yard. We need more of those. 
During the political season, which seems like fourteen months out of the year, people show their colors. Typically that’s going to be red or blue. In our current climate those colors alone allow passers by to infer a lot.

Depending on who you are, those inferences can vary and they can be positive or negative based on personal experience and what we’re conditioned to believe about those colors and the people who represent them. 
I’d like to pick on one sign in particular, the “Hate Has No Home Here” sign. This placard signifies to others that you are a righteous person who doesn’t put up with hatred. Those who live here are probably “woke.” It’s pretty well known that “woke” is a bastardization of the original meaning. Sure, language changes, but this is appropriation of the original meaning to be aware of bad actors by the HR mafia and professional managerial class. The original meaning was about material well being and was stripped of its teeth to be an aesthetic symbol of personal virtue. “Look at me; I’m a good person!” Here’s your cookie. Go sit down.
The new “cool kids” meaning of the word is all about empathy. My problem is what people actually do with their outward profession of empathy. How much of it is just performative feel-good absolution from behavior that is far from empathetic? 
We live under a system that makes a complete mockery of the concept. Corporations have twisted the idea of empathy for HR platitudes and for feel good marketing. University business programs teach a Bizarro World version of empathy in order to develop and sell products to consumers. 
I graduated from such a masters program at Northwestern. When the professor explained the concept, my classmates, a cohort of professionals in various sectors, seemed to have just heard the word for the first time. Simply put, the class weaponized empathy to extract data or manipulate consumer buying habits. 
In an earlier post, I talked about Mister Rogers and the radical empathy upon which he ran. The empathy taught in that program is anything but. If we’re going to survive this rigged machine, we need more than performative empathy. 
Well meaning people plant the “In This House, We Believe…” signs in their front yard, but do not seem to consider the causes for each of the stated issues. The answer is the system. Does planting that sign make the holder as deep as the thickness of the cardboard it is printed on? That depends on whether the sign owner understands the abuses of the system. 
Evanston, IL is a good, quick case study for us to look at. This is the home of Northwestern University and an affluent town, where the “Hate Has No Home Here” style sign resides in the front lawns across this progressive community. While this liberal bastion is chock-full of yoga pants and chai milk lattes, it is known for its NIMBYism. 
When it came to extending an L line from the city into their neighborhoods, that universal welcome suddenly dried up. They fought the infrastructure tooth and nail, quietly citing concerns about bringing in "the element" to protect their property values and maintain spatial segregation. The empathy advertised on the lawn stops at the property line. 
It is a class boundary disguised as community concern, ensuring a certain working class stays in their designated zones while the homeowners get to feel righteous, and probably plausibly ignorant. They will happily commission a committee to study reparations to signal their virtue, just so long as they don't have to build the infrastructure that actually lets the working class access their zip code.
This conditional empathy shows up in familiar digital front yards. I see it among a cohort of gay professional acquaintances I’ve known since my Florida days. We only interact online now, which is basically just the digital version of planting a yard sign. 
There is a rigid mandate to 'vote blue no matter who,' a demand for absolute moral alignment from people whose class interests are already secured. If you don’t sing with the choir, look out for the lecture, the scoffing, and the digital excommunication. 
I’ve been called a “Russian Bot” and told my perspective is “batshit crazy.” One guy even jokingly quipped that I’m a “loser” because I couldn’t afford to travel with ‘the fam’ to Mykonos. They demand absolute moral purity, but they still use a working-class bank account as a punchline. But the cohort demands, “Don’t question my morals.” 
These are the same professionals who own service businesses and won't give a Gen Z kid an entry-level shot, or who will fiercely defend their political choices right up until the issue stops directly benefiting them. I’ve been guilty of falling into these traps, but I have decided to do the work to consider how others are materially impacted. 
The empathy my cohort claims to champion on their feeds, however, conveniently seems to vanish when it costs them something in the real world. Hell, one progressive professional has even opened a gay bar and breathlessly proclaims it’s a sanctuary, a safe space. Meanwhile, the business relies on the right wing model of tipped wage labor with squishy benefits (lots of loopholes). What does that sanctuary provide the people working in it? Sounds like the same precarity to me. At least they get to pick their pronouns, I guess.
Listen, I know we all mean well, but if we’re going to profess something we need to work to follow through on those sentiments, so we’re not just being hypocrites. We need to go beyond platitudes and understand where this division comes from. 
In my experience and understanding, it comes from above, the owner class. Hatred of others is often used in grievance politics in order to keep the blame off the actual perpetrators of the horrors in society. 
There is a well-known meme of the rich businessman with a huge pile of cookies and two men flanking him: a blue collar worker and a brown-skinned immigrant. The businessman tells the white blue collar worker to look out because the non-white person wants his cookie. That’s the whole game in a nutshell. The yard signs just help the people guarding the cookie jar feel like they are part of the solution, while the actual workers are left fighting over the crumbs.
This is why I have such an affinity for the 'Proud Union Member' sign. It doesn’t claim moral superiority. It doesn’t ask you to validate my identity. It simply states a material reality: I stand with my coworkers to fight for a bigger slice of the cookie for all of us. 
One is a vanity shield to protect the status quo; the other is a tool to build collective power. If we’re going to unpack our baggage, it’s time we stop planting the performative signs and start organizing to actually fix the material conditions those other signs just pretend to care about.
RACING BUSES
One day when pulling up to drop one of my little guys off from school, I noticed another boy, who I assumed to be my student’s brother, was on the sidewalk a few houses prior to my stop. He was facing my direction of travel, but waiting and looking back toward my bus. As he was looking back, his body got into an upright runner’s pose. Champing at the bit to start running down the sidewalk, the brother was going to RACE ME. 
Well, first, that made me laugh. Second, I knew I needed to be careful, because I didn't know what he might do, so I slowed down. In any case, I was close enough to my student's house that I turned on the student lights. To me, that added to the excitement. In his mind, we were off to the races. For safety, I slowed down well below the speed limit to keep my eye on the brother running down the sidewalk. For safety purposes, I needed him to stay in front of me. How did he do? He won, of course! I let him win, in case you couldn't tell.
Each day, I've made up a little excuse to explain why he won. I've accused him of wearing rocket-propelled shoes. I told him my bus had really bad gas, so it was farting-along that day. (He didn't get the joke. Oh well, I thought it was clever.) One day, I told him I had lapped him, having gone around the block already at super-speed, but he beat me to his house on the second round. So, really, I had won. He was incredulous. 
Trying to get him to stop, because this clearly can’t go on forever, I told him my mechanic told me this racing was putting too much stress on the engine and I had to stop. (Well, shit. That didn't work. He didn't get that hint either.) 
One day after he won, he told me that I needed to get a Lamborghini. I snapped back, "What?! I drive a school bus. I can't afford that!"
His parents love it, BTW. His dad even videotaped it. Even though I'm being careful, something tells me that if my safety manager would see this on the bus video, the story element would be out of bounds. I’d probably be reprimanded. The Union would get a call. Again, I’d be asking for forgiveness instead of permission. 
Meanwhile, this is creating community and memories for the kid, with whom most drivers would have never interacted. He's young enough that he believes my silliness. He's even "given me days off" per his dad. One day the ground was too wet and he said I'd slide all over. (Mighty generous of the kid.)
All of this is true. So why am I telling you this on a blog about work and class?
Because I'm an adult in a 16-ton diesel vehicle. He's a kid trying to compete. And I have three choices. I could ignore him and go on by. I could recognize him and make sure I didn't hurt him. If I really wanted to be a monster, I could jump the curb and run him over.
As it so happens, the latter example is how the United States behaves with smaller countries, or any country for that matter, that tries a different system than the almighty capitalism. Instead of allowing the other, less powerful country to develop their own system that benefits the people, the US comes in and runs it over. Embargo of Cuba for 70 years, anyone?
Why does the US cream any country that tries anything antithetical to Capital? To be blunt, the people on the bus cannot be allowed to witness another country succeed. They’d start to question why there’s no air conditioning on the bus and why diesel fumes waft through the cabin, causing them to choke and get sick. 
When the US Bus runs over the country on the sidewalk, the press always covers it with propaganda. See! They never win. They tripped on the sidewalk along the way, breaking their bones. Ha! I knew that would happen; it always does. Meanwhile there’s the tire tread of a bus on their neck. The press is artistically cropping that out of frame and the narrative. Fox News even makes fun of the kid.
None of this is ancient history for the US. This isn't a conspiracy theory whispered by a guy in a tinfoil hat at a bus stop. This is the route the bus has been driving for well over one hundred years.
Iran, 1953: Prime Minister Mossadegh nationalized the oil. He was overthrown by a CIA-backed coup and the Shah was installed.
Guatemala, 1954: President Arbenz redistributed unused land. He too was overthrown by the CIA. The land belonged to the United Fruit Company and they wouldn’t have that.
Chile, 1973: President Allende gave workers a voice. He died during a CIA-backed military coup on the original “September 11th” - the one the US perpetrated. The US-backed Pinochet took over. As a brutal dictator, thousands disappeared.
Cuba: Embargoed for over sixty years. Cuba struggled for independence since dirt was clean. The US didn’t like their alliances after the US-backed president was overthrown, so the US put them in a vice. Because the citizens revolted, they were told they can't trade, can't bank, can't breathe. Since then, they’ve been pointed at and called a failure while being hog tied. We’re told that it’s the “horrors of communism!” Really?!
The kid didn't trip. The bus ran him over. And the press cropped the tire tread out of the photo.
And the bus driver? He admitted it. His name was Smedley Butler. Two-time Medal of Honor recipient. Major General, United States Marine Corps. Thirty-three years of service. In 1935, he wrote:
"I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism."
The bus is telling you it jumped the curb. A driver told you ninety years ago, in writing. And we still act surprised and blame the kid under the wheels.
The kid on my sidewalk gave me a day off because he was worried I'd slide in the rain. I’d say that was mighty generous and empathetic of him.
The bus that runs over countries doesn't give anyone a day off. It doesn't slow down. It doesn't pretend to have bad gas. It doesn't let the kid win and then make up a silly story about rocket shoes.
It just drives. And the press takes a picture. And the passengers on the bus choke on diesel fumes and call it “freedom” while being told the kid couldn’t handle the pressure.
PAINTING WITH EYELASHES
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that many in my cohort of gay, Gen-X men get their information from corporate media outlets like MSNowBC, the NYT, and NPR with their hushed librarian voices. From that list of sources, one voice seems to be the ‘first chair’ in the choir, Rachel Maddow.
Back in the day, I would not miss her show. I thought, “Boy, she is smart and can dissect a topic like nobody’s business.” She is a Rhodes Scholar and an accomplished media personality after all. I will say, it was quite jarring knowing what she looked like on the ‘lefty’ satellite radio station, Air America and seeing her on MSNBC batting big, fake eyelashes. Those eyelashes should have tipped me off. 
Over the course of a half-hour, she meticulously builds a full political landscape for her audience. Like a master painter, she decides what to include and what to omit; she smears certain actors into the background while sharpening the foreground details upon which she wants you to fixate. If you follow along like you're painting with Ross, you walk away feeling like you've created a brilliant picture. Yet, you never left your recliner. You feel like a master theorist, a most special boy, for seeing it her way.
Like Ross, she doesn't just paint the scene; she paints the mood. Where he adds a "happy little bush," she adds a wry joke or a gentle reassurance that "what we’re seeing emerge" confirms your team, and YOU are right. But here is the structural limitation: Bob Ross really only ever painted one cozy mountain landscape. No figure drawing, no color theory, no historical gestalt. In the same way, Maddow gives you one frame, one method. When you try to recount the information later, you can scribble out something that looks roughly close to her picture, but you've never taken the time to understand the messy, conflicting complexities she omitted. It’s just good enough to hang on your mental fridge and feel self-satisfied, while actually leaving you completely unable to see the parts of the world she left off the canvas.
And before I go any further, I need to apologize to Bob Ross. Comparing him to corporate media is an insult to his legacy. Bob Ross actually handed his audience the tools, explained the mechanics, and empowered everyday people to create something real. He democratized art. Maddow wants you to feel as if she’s democratizing knowledge about current events, but the corporate media apparatus does the exact opposite. She is paid to be a propagandist, a gatekeeper of understanding who pacifies the high-intellect viewer, ensuring they mistake the act of watching her show for participating in a high-stakes game of gotcha..  In the end, she’s curating a  palatable reality for her audience, yes, but also those who sign her massive check.
To be clear, this isn't some right-wing ambush on Rachel Maddow, or ‘left’ news programming in general. Right-wing propaganda itself is slop. It is loud, clumsy, and the way a network like Fox News twists information is usually visible from space, or if you do just the slightest of fact checking. (Hey- they do get some things correct too.)  But liberal corporate media is far more insidious. Because it relies on the cadence of intellect: the Rhodes Scholar vocabulary, the lack of, or limited, bombast, the thoughtful pregnant pauses with pursed lips, and the bespoke graphics; it flatters the viewer. It convinces them they are consuming objective truth rather than the highly curated ideology of the owner class. The funny thing is, the bad guy is never the United States. Fingers will fly, but never in this direction. Every network from NewsMax to NPR makes sure that is “the truth.”
This sophisticated veneer is exactly why the liberal progressive cohort feels so comfortable throwing around words like "Nazi," "Fascism," and "Hitler" with the same aggressive ignorance as those who call Democrats “Marxists” and “Communists.” The Liberals may not have been handed these high-stakes labels by their favorite TV anchors like those on the right, but they too have absolutely no material understanding of the political economy that actually birthed those movements. To them, "fascism" isn't the merger of corporate and state power; it's just a catch-all synonym for "the red team,” people with bad manners, or authoritarians. Because they get their history from an eyelash-batting propagandist rather than actual materialist analysis, they confidently wear their historical illiteracy as a badge of honor.
Once you realize corporate media leads you by the nose to keep all sorts of factions happy, it would do you good to look into independent journalists who do their work for the love of it, to absolve them of their former sins, or because they were jettisoned from mainstream media because they stopped singing the approved songs. Following is a short-ish list of folks you can find on YouTube.

Listen, YouTube may have some “tin foil hat” conspiracy stank, but the following folks dissect the news and produce well-researched historical essays, often dispelling the narratives we’ve been fed our entire lives. 

UNFTR (Unf*cking The Republic)
The Angle:  Takes a sledgehammer to the neoliberal economic myths the professional-managerial class was raised to believe, bringing receipts on how "respectable" politicians engineered our current crises.
Point of Note:  Hosted by "Max," who curses freely (fitting the title), and the show features an outro song with a specific, catchy line calling out the swearing.

The Chris Hedges Report
The Angle:  Strips away the illusion that electing the "right" Democrat fixes a fundamentally imperialist system. Focuses on the corporate coup d'état that hollowed out the working class.
Point of Note:  Hedges is an ordained Presbyterian minister and a Pulitzer-winning former New York Times foreign correspondent who was effectively pushed out of corporate media for publicly opposing the Iraq War. He is living proof of the boundaries of corporate journalism.

Democracy at Work
The Angle:  The direct counter-programming to university business programs. It breaks down Marxist economics, capital exploitation, and the necessity of workplace democracy in plain, pedestrian language.
Point of Note:  Founded by Dr. Richard Wolff, who delivers radical, structural critiques of capitalism with the gentle, patient demeanor of a kindly grandfather explaining how a clock works.

....(and so on)
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