“They will send women and children as undercover terrorists. If we continue like this, we will reach another October 7.”

He’s not exactly wrong — why won’t the West realize that terrorizing the terrorists doesn’t make them less radicalized? To justify one heinous act of violence with another is an investment in more of the same.

Obviously it’s a big messy situation that’s too complicated for simple blanket statements (and what do I know?), but it seems fair to say that history repeats itself unless we can reject this flawed zero-sum premise that my suffering can justify yours.

Do I condone Hamas? Absolutely not. Would I condone attacking Israel if they bombed my home and murdered my family? I bet I would…

It’s easy to espouse aggressively simplistic moral principles from the privilege of safety. Much harder and more important to root those principles in a foundation of empathy.

lol the problem isn’t that everybody should move out, it’s that hardly anyone can afford their own apartment (let alone single family home)

I’ve been on both sides of this and it really depends on what management is expecting at the time. If “cart run” is a considered a task unto itself then it can be bliss, but if you’re short staffed then management starts to look at “cart run” as a means to an end. When the expectation becomes that you’ll be back on register in 10-15 minutes (but all the corrals out front are now full and no customers are complaining about it), then all those wayward carts mean you gotta hustle.

When I eventually found myself in a supervisory role, I remembered that and tried to equitably rotate between everybody that I knew liked doing carts (or offer when I could tell someone was getting burnt out/long day and needed to go outside for a while) and just let them do their thing. Mostly people really appreciated that and in those cases it was gratifying to be the cool supervisor, but I hated that my responsibility had become to ensure that the front carts were acceptably full at any given time rather than to gather the carts – all it takes is a random rush and suddenly there are no carts and a micromanagey shift lead is chewing you out because they only appear at moments like these (or immediately after the rush while everyone is catching their breath to ask why you can’t find something to do) and your guy outside was just standing in the back of the lot smoking a cigarette, the shift lead doesn’t care that there were carts mere minutes before they arrived on the floor, nor that the cart runner only just started that cig after gathering all the carts strewn into bushes and discarded between cars or down the sidewalk…

god I don’t miss retail lol