Tim Gurner tells the Financial Review Property Summit workers have become “arrogant” since COVID and “We’ve got to kill that attitude.”
Cancel Culture: the practice or tendency of engaging in mass canceling as a way of expressing disapproval and exerting social pressure.
Consequence: a result or effect of an action or condition.
This is an excerpt from a more comprehensive piece I wrote on the banality of ‘whiteness.’
I’d thought to write a piece on the cascade of uber wealthy saying the quiet part out loud in recent weeks, telling us — to our faces — that all those decades of working people ‘complaining’ about the institutional racism, misogyny and classism that we intuited were keeping us on our knees, unable to prosper, to move forward, to thrive — all the reasons, the excuses these self-congratulatory gatekeepers had for not treating working folks with dignity, let alone paying them — was all in our heads. That all ‘we the people’ had to do was work harder, be sweeter and stop complaining and that we would be fine.
The self ordained ‘ruling class’ were not ‘gaslighting’ us, they were just smarter, they worked harder, they just knew better than we did what was good for us. That ‘we the people’ were lazy and ungrateful.
‘We the people’ aren’t fine. In fact, weren’t f*cking pissed and over it.
My first thought was to write about them, but lately they’ve done such a stellar job of telling us themselves, saying the quiet part out loud that I’ve elected to let these clever folks speak for themselves.
“We need to see unemployment rise. Unemployment has to rise forty to fifty percent in my view. We need to see pain in the economy, we need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around…We’ve got to kill that attitude and that has to come through hurting the economy…”
Tim Gurner says he’s ‘worth’ over $750 million US. What he fails to mention is that he started his real estate business, not from being a nose-to-the-grindstone wunderkind as a gym tycoon, but with a stake from his grandfather: this self-satisfied millennial puddlehead has never worked for actual survival a single day in his life. But he’s got a lot to say about his ‘lazy’ contemporaries who need to be smacked back into their places.
Oh those crocodile tears over his ‘insensitive’ comments, but watch Gurner. It is pretty obvious that his comments were well thought out, so this has been on his mind for a while: he was merely ‘expressing’ himself. And my wager is that many of his self-styled mogul contemporaries were pretty pissed. Gurner revealed to all the world what they talk about at the uber-rich shareholders’ ‘Happy Hours’ when they think no one is listening. Oh Tim, poor Tim.
Chuckleheads like Tim Gurner leverage their whiteness to access the levers of power: power to gerrymander elections; power to gerrymander the stock market; power to gerrymander the mechanisms of governance, taxation, regulation and the judiciary; the power to gerrymander the assembly-line floor, to withhold life altering healthcare, to rape with impunity and to decide who becomes a star and who is never heard from again.
While the rest of us are expected to resign ourselves to our lesser station in the social order, bend over and grab our ankles and take it up the a** without resistance or complaint.
Begging the question: how’s that goin’ for ya’?
