Parasite

When Elon Musk announced that DOGE was going to rid us of “the parasite class” once and for all, I understood that he was talking about me. When he X’d later that Stalin and Hitler hadn’t killed any Jews, it was all the work of civil servants, I understood that he was talking about me. And when all the people that helped raise him to his lofty heights jeered and guffawed and joked about tearing the government down and giving those assholes what they deserved, they were talking about me also.

I come from a fairly long line of public servants. One grandma was a public school teacher, the other a librarian. One grandfather went to the Naval Academy and served in the Navy through World War II and the Korean War. After he retired he went to seminary school and became an Episcopal priest, a different kind of public service. There are many teachers and librarians in my family on all sides. My Mom worked as a software engineer contracted with the federal government. My father was a professor at a public university. I have worked in public libraries since 1996. My husband is also a public servant.

Elon Musk, a man whose companies have received billions of dollars in contracts and tax breaks to deliver unto us rockets that specialize in rapid unscheduled disassembly, would deem us all parasites.

This attitude towards public employees is not new to me. It’s not a new idea that public servants are somehow at all once lazy, greedy, worthless, conniving, unmotivated, corrupt, useless, stupid and evil geniuses. When your salary is paid by taxpayers for 30 years, you hear about it. Although, as I like to point out to anyone sassy enough to yell “My tax dollars pay your salary!” at me, my own tax dollars also pay my salary.

Public employees are such an easy target for jokes we hardly notice it. After all, the “sloth as DMV employee” in Zootopia is genuinely amusing and who of us hasn’t felt themselves melting under the crushing wait times at the Post Office? Disliking the government is basically as American as apple pie, on both the Right and the Left.

So I’m used to people making broad generalizations about public service. I understand and firmly believe in a desire to make sure that our tax dollars are being spent wisely and well. The organization I work for is, by law, audited by the state every year. It’s not a gotcha kind of thing. My organization must show the state it’s doing what it says it’s doing with the money the public gives us. This is eminently reasonable.

But for all the promises Trump parrots about fighting government waste, that’s not what Elon Musk is doing with their antigovernmental employee messages. They’re not making vague platitudes about efficiency. They’re calling millions of American people parasites. They’re saying that left to their own devices all the public employees in America are going to rise up and kill all the (Insert group that you think shouldn’t be killed here). They’re saying we’re a threat. They’re saying that we’re not human. And just like that, the conversation has changed. It’s not that I’m useless. I’m actually a subhuman parasite who is a threat to you and your family and your way of life. Me, personally.

Oh, but not YOU I can hear some of you insist, accompanied by an eye roll suggesting that I’m “overreacting”. YOU’RE not the kind of job we meant when we voted for this. We were voting to get rid of the extraordinarily wealthy and corrupt public servants that get paid extortionate amounts of money to do nothing all day and/or run the Deep State or both at the same time. Schrodinger’s Public Employee. They don’t actually exist, but everyone thinks they know someone who knows one. As long as you’re a “good” employee you shouldn’t have anything to worry about. I have news for you. It doesn’t matter who you meant. Musk has hung a target around the neck of every single public employee.

It may shock you to learn that the majority of public servants are normal people doing a good job under circumstances that are almost invariably over promised and under funded. Over promising and under funding has in fact been our nation’s policy for decades. When politicians chuckle about “death by a thousand cuts” and “making the government small enough to drown in the bathtub”, this is the method. When you’re waiting in that line at the DMV for so long you can feel your soul leave your body, it’s because there aren’t enough people working to help the numbers of customers they know they’re going to have. They don’t hire enough people because they can’t afford to because they haven’t been budgeted enough to do so. And you leave infuriated not by the politicians that guaranteed that outcome but at the single clerk working their ass off to help 50 people at a time. This is the American Way.

Here’s a scandalous truth I fully admit to. I make a decent middle class salary. I have medical and dental benefits. I have a pension that I have been paying into for almost 30 years. Some people, like the billionaire oligarchs that have made Trump 2.0 possible, and who control 2 trillion dollars amongst them, will encourage you to believe that somehow makes me a bad person. I would call it getting paid a reasonable salary for providing a public service to the people of my community.

It is true that my job is less volatile than many private sector gigs. The lack of volatility is appealing to me, which I think makes me smart rather than evil. However there are trade offs. I’ve never enjoyed profit sharing, stock options or bonuses. I haven’t had a raise in 13 years, because 13 years ago I reached the top of my job’s salary scale. I’m not complaining. I’m just saying that working in public service is a choice that has trade offs.

I started graduate school to get my Masters in Library Science in 1994. It was Seattle in the early 90s. Microsoft was out of the garage by then and you couldn’t walk ten feet without tripping over a different tech start up. I had a part time job at a company that designed corporate automated voicemail systems. In a rented garage 20 minutes from where I was going to school Jeff and McKenzie Scott Bezos were starting an online bookstore. A woman in my class was the company’s 3rd employee, after explaining to Bezos at a party that he didn’t have to invent a way to classify the books he was selling. Machine Readable Cataloging Records produced by the government funded Library of Congress could do it all for him. I’m not sure where she is today, but I heard she retired in her 30s.

Many people I went to school with ended up at Microsoft or Amazon or any of a dozen other new tech companies and their spinoffs. A friend went to work for Paul Allen’s pet project: a museum devoted to rock and roll; science fiction; and whatever else he owned in his large collections of random memorabilia. It eventually became MoPop. Another friend went to work for the newly established Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Yet another was sent by Amazon to live and work in Amsterdam while they helped set up a new European call center.

Sure I envied some of them. Sure I worried sometimes that I had missed the boat. But I also believed that I had a job that helped make my community a better place to live. At the end of the day I felt I’d added more to the positive column than the negative. I’d made some people’s day better and I hadn’t made anyone’s day worse. I hadn’t spent my time making extraordinarily wealthy people even wealthier. I made a choice. It’s true that I have a pension. I’m grateful that I have a pension. There was a day in America when having a pension was the norm rather than the exception. Perhaps we should ask the billionaires insisting that we shut down all public institutions why they don’t offer them anymore.

It’s taken me a long time to write this and I’ll be honest that part of the reason is that I’m scared. Part of each day is spent in fear. They’re coming for libraries sure as they have come for schools. Pro-censorship groups have been laying the groundwork for years, acting as this administration’s shock troops. The President signed the order dismantling the Institute for Museum and Library Services before signing the one dismantling the Department of Education. Across the country states are implementing laws that hold librarians personally and criminally responsible for customers checking out “obscene” materials. The definition of obscenity is always left vague but in practice it’s any materials that acknowledge the existence of LGBTQ+ people; any materials that acknowledge that women or minorities have had a role in history; and any materials that acknowledge that non-whites have had a role in history.

Most public libraries will tell you that for years now we’ve been dealing with a stark increase in anti-government activists focusing their attention on libraries. They make ruckuses in Board Meetings and flood us with FOIA requests. The FOIA requests themselves are often for remarkably banal information, but they take time and any mistakes are claimed to be evidence of nefarious doings. YouTube and TikTok are awash in videos by people aggressively trying to “catch” public employees making mistakes or inadvertently giving out incorrect information. None of this stuff started on January 20th. They’ve been wearing us down for years.

So, when I hear Elon Musk saying that public employees are parasites, I know that the audience for that message is already out there. They’re already circling. They’ve already dehumanized us. When Elon Musk says that public servants were responsible for the Holocaust, he’s giving haters more fuel, more excuses, more justification for their irrational rage against a group of people most of whom are just trying to get by; trying to do a good job without enough resources; trying to make their communities better.