03/08/2025
I wrestled with whether to share this publicly. It’s raw. It’s personal. But this isn’t a cry for help — it’s an act of defiance. I’m not ashamed to be fighting like hell from the back of a Subaru. I’m building something, and this is what it looks like.
If you’ve ever wondered why independent local journalism matters — or why I haven’t walked away from this fight — read Part II of “Why the Greylock Guardian?”
I never thought I'd launch a GoFundMe to support local journalism, but this mission is too important to fail. Please help.
Hey, Greylock Nation —
The coyotes have been getting closer, pretty much every night. Their yipping and yowling sound like psychotic witches on acid. Lately, their nocturnal chorus has been kicked off by one member of the pack whose call is lower and longer, nearly identical to any wolf howl you’ve heard on a nature show. No surprise, given that our coyotes here in New England carry between 30% and 50% grey wolf DNA from Canada. That’s also why our coyotes are much larger and more social than specimens from out West.
These warm nights, their racket has wakened me as it drifts into the Subaru through the nylon window screens I installed to keep a little fresh air flowing into the car at night. The maniacal screeching is meant to unnerve its prey, causing rabbits or raccoons or woodchucks to make panicked bad decisions to flee instead of hunkering down, thus revealing themselves.
The Wolf at My Door, Literally and Figuratively
A couple nights ago, the pack took its spree within 100 feet of my car, but triangulated my position from points near the road, down the hayfield, and over by the brook. Last night, they surprised me by starting up at late dusk as I finished up preparations for bedding down.
Coyotes rarely attack humans. Rarely.
On the other hand, years ago, this pack killed and devoured my two-month-old Scottish Highland heifer calf with its mother and aunt trying to fight them off with three-foot-long horns and maternal, bovine rage. They play the percentages.
I don’t think I’m paranoid for thinking that these marauders are calculating their chances of taking down a lone man, far from anyone who could intervene in an attack. Honestly, though? I’m probably more troubled on the daily by the metaphorical connotations of this Man vs. Nature dynamic:
Despite the fact that I’m working a full-time day job and driving DoorDash at night, each week I’m slipping closer and closer to a point where I’ll no longer be able to keep the wolf from the door. It’s an expression based in a fear of vulnerability and exposure rooted so very, very deeply in the human psyche. In my case, I get to live out both the historical origins and contemporary analogy of the phrase simultaneously.
So, yeah. You could say I pretty closely identify with all my brothers and sisters who are struggling to make ends meet, to keep the wolf from the door.
Privilege | Poverty
And Fate seems to be hell-bent on making sure the affinity isn’t just clear to me, but truly visceral. I returned to the world of temp work well over a year ago. In that time, I worked, for barely above minimum wage, both for a local college and a boarding school — at the former, as a Campus Safety dispatcher; the latter, as a dishwasher. Both are institutions for the offspring of the elite, and only a couple days into my tenure at both schools were enough to witness the painfully stark contrast between how the children of the 1% experience the world and how the rest of humanity’s kids grow up.
Having grown up in Litchfield, Conn., I thought I understood the differences. But just having access, as a worker, to the exquisite culinary offerings available three meals a day — plus all-day gourmet ice cream and sparkling water dispensers with optional immunity and alkaline boosts — was enough to make me uncomfortable partaking of such bounty.
The chef at the high school had cases of split redwood logs flown in from California to use in the smoker. Let that sink in. None of the wood on this side of the United States was deemed adequate to impart some smoky goodness to the food of 15-year-olds.
Waste, Guilt, the Luxury of Excess
There are many, many other examples of how these students are absolutely coddled compared to the kids of the working class. But the food may be the most salient, simply because of what it represents: the raw materials for building healthy bodies and minds. The immense waste, in negative correlation, was almost too much to bear. My sense of guilt was overwhelming as I carried 55-gallon contractor bags bulging with salmon; pomegranate; asparagus; hand-tossed pizza; roasted vegetables; out-of-season blueberries, raspberries, and strawberries — and so much more — to the compost barrels as I watched the famines in Gaza and Sudan unfold in my social media feeds.
I was once ordered to throw out over 100 pounds of single-serving containers of assorted yoghurt and juice boxes and bottles simply because someone had forgotten to take them out of picnic coolers over the weekend. The containers were still cool to the touch, and it was YOGHURT, for f**k’s sake. You can leave it at room temperature for days and it’s still good. I think my boss sensed that I might try to Robin Hood that s**t to a meal site, because he monitored me transporting it all the way from the kitchen to the dumpster to make sure I disposed of it all.
And please understand, I don’t blame these kids. Sure, some of them are already arrogant little snobs, but the vast majority of them were really sweet, polite, and full of idealism. But what happens to them over the span of their childhoods and young adulthoods is that they are conditioned to understand that being smothered with such luxurious abundance and nurturing care is normal. The default. When opulence is your baseline, how can you wrap your head around the fact that a fight would have broken out over the food you scraped off your plate into the trash barrels in plenty of locales across the world?
The scale of privilege is so disproportionate that these young people are growing up with no more ability to comprehend real economic desperation than the poorest in society can begin to imagine that having the best of everything all the time is just how a person lives.
Lycanthropy
But Lachesis was not finished with her cosmic mischief, tossing my life into a destiny of extremes. My temp agency (maybe it’s actually a front for the Three Fates…) placed me with a financial institution as a collections agent. O, the fu***ng irony. Turning my phone off during the day so I don’t have to see the messages pouring in from collectors chasing ME down for money while I’m playing the mirror game in the database on my screen.
For the time being, I actually get to try to be the good cop, calling people who aren’t that far behind in their payments, trying to help them find a way to keep their car, or house, or tractor, or whatever. Some of it involves getting them a loan deferment for a month or two so they can catch their financial breath while they wait for their first paycheck from a new job to come in. Other times, a referral to a financial coach is the way to help people see that there is light at the end of the tunnel. The more I learn how it all works, the more I’m able to slow the collections process down with boring administrative gum in the works — long enough, maybe, for customers to beg a family member to help them make a payment or two.
The Stereotype is There to Fortify the Divide
While talking head apologists for the financial sector bash these customers as irresponsible deadbeats in the mainstream media, I’ve run into almost no borrowers who fit that bill. The folks I talk to on the phone all day long are, almost to a one, hardworking men and women for whom life just took an unexpected turn. Teachers, contractors, firefighters, farmers, retail clerks — you name ’em, I talk with ’em and listen to the details of the tragedies that derailed their year just when things had finally been looking up.
At least once a week, I work with a customer whose story is so gut-wrenching and so obviously true that I have to log off and head to my car to weep for a few minutes. I wonder how many months or years I'd have to do this job for my empathy to be completely stripped away.
Accidents and medical conditions are huuuuuuge catalysts in these catastrophic reactions. Layoffs send a lot of workers into downward spirals every month. Dastardly spouses, exes, and family members create more than a few delinquent debtors. Probably the most insidious factor, though? The inexorable upward creep of the cost of living — reaching into our wages and nibbling away 20 cents with every gallon of gas, 75 cents on every pound of hamburger, and 10 cents on every ounce of shampoo.
Inflation is savaging everyone from the lower middle class on down. Families have it rough because having children means buying and buying and buying. The elderly may have it even harder, because most of them are on fixed incomes such that just keeping the lights and heat on is becoming unsupportable.
Americans are beginning to lose faith in the system. And they are getting angry.
Fed’s Brutal Honesty: Pain Is the Policy
To paraphrase Michael Parenti: the poor and the working class know that there are powerful forces at work behind the scenes pulling the levers that control their lives. They have, historically, just not known what those forces are. For the first time, the workers got to peek behind the curtain when Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said quite openly that the United States needed to enact policies that would intentionally drive up unemployment to bring inflation under control.
Not create strategic price controls or caps.
Not fix supply chains.
Not offer targeted subsidies or rebates.
And certainly not tax excess corporate profits.
No. The one tool in his Masters of the Universe toolbox is to inflict pain on the lower two-thirds of the population.
Someone to Blame
Now, as the Trump administration is setting fire to the social safety net and amputating every system and every support it can that allows for even the slightest leveling — and we’re talking millimeters of leveling — people are looking around for someone to blame. Someone, or a group of someones more accurately, upon whom to project the rage stemming from the very real hardships they suffer and the perception that they have been left to flap in the breeze while a tiny fraction gets obscenely rich.
We’ve Seen This Before
The more desperate people become, the more willing they are to accept any sacrificial scapegoat identified by those in power.
I know most of you see where this is going. You realize that this is all beginning to smell suspiciously like Nuremberg, 1935. It should scare the hell out of you.
You see, in the various blue-collar jobs or app-driving gigs I’ve done over the last few years, I’ve shared countless conversations with working-class brothers and sisters who do feel abandoned.
And that’s because they were abandoned. A generation ago.
Now you have condescending liberal pundits and media people constantly depicting the struggling half of the country mesmerized by right-wing propaganda as some unpleasant other — some diseased and nasty life form to be tolerated until robotics and AI advance far enough that landscaping and auto repair can be outsourced to cyborgs.
Currently, the nation’s official internal enemy is the pool of slave labor called migrants. I have bowed out of too many conversations with low-information acquaintances who really believe that the U.S. is giving free houses, cars, health care, and literal sacks of cash to any immigrant who shows up to demand it. It doesn’t matter that they have zero personal knowledge of any single person who benefitted from this mythical largesse. They hear some lie or venal insinuation on Fox or talk radio, which they will repeat and amplify until it becomes true in their minds and the minds of anyone they can convince.
Secondary public enemies are socialists, Muslims, academics, journalists, and pretty much anyone who utters the phrase, “climate crisis.”
Local Journalism: a Machine that Kills Fascism
Only a tiny fraction of the working class/poor I asked reported that they consumed any amount of local news. I am convinced that the battle for the hearts and minds of people who voted for an idiot authoritarian demagogue isn’t won in the national media. That battle — which is ultimately the battle for the soul of this country — is going to be fought in the pages of the local press, zip code by zip code, where people live, work, love, and play.
Local news has the power to humanize neighbors of different ethnicities and religions. Local news can point out local effects of climate change that are undeniable. Local news can make the dangers of hazardous chemicals, corruption, and even war both real and relevant.
It pains me that I saw all this (and wrote about it) coming down the pike ten years ago and yet the country is more at risk of fascism and societal collapse than ever. I am absolutely despondent that I was so naïve as to think that I could help dilute some of the right-wing brainwashing by creating a journalistic space that appealed to both the cultural and financial elite and to rank-and-file workers — where I could use the power of the pen to address the large cracks in the economy in ways that would help keep people from falling through them.
The Greylock Guardian will correct that.
Anyone is welcome to read it, of course. But I’m in the process of engineering its editorial structure to be of immediate use to the blue-collar crowd — my crowd.
And whether or not we’re your crowd, too, I hope you can understand how important it is that a truly local, independent alternative press thrive — even in superficially progressive regions like the Berkshires. Political tides can turn overnight. Do you trust current news outlets to have the spine to stand up to fascism when its shadow falls over this place we call home?
If this mission sounds good to you, contribute to the project. If I have supported your work by spreading the word in the last decade, and you’ve always wondered what you can do to return the favor — this is it. Go to my GoFundMe and give what you can — even $5 helps.
With all faith and affection,
the mongrel (a.k.a. Jay Velázquez)
Editor, The Greylock Glass & Guardian
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