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Mom worked hard for social change the 90 years of her life. But she’d been frustrated by health care. She held on to the notion that if people just knew the facts, they’d support reform — or socialism, for that matter.

At the same time, Mom’s bottom-line political analysis of why bad things happen (Reagan’s reelection; support for the Iraq invasion) was “People are stupid.”

That’s the contradiction facing the supporters of health care reform going forward.

My mother’s daughter, I have to admit I’ve been hitching my hopes to the Democrats’ reality-based strategy: Tell people what’s in it for them, demonstrate how their fears won’t be realized, and sit back and watch as all but the wingnuttiest teabaggers retreat into apathy or even get on board the reform train.

It is hard to resist trying to overpower irrationality with reason. But, unfortunately, you can’t hold a rational colloquy with a person yelling “Fire” in a crowded theater.

In fact, speaking truth to unreason may fan the hysteria. Social-science research shows that people tend to believe only the “facts” that jibe with what they already believe. And worse: The more they hear corrections to what they believe, the more fiercely they hold to their misperceptions. A University of Michigan political scientist writing in the New York Times last week described an experiment finding that the proportion of conservatives who believed Bush’s tax cuts increased federal revenue almost doubled when they were given evidence against that claim. “People seem to argue so vehemently against the corrective information that they end up strengthening the misperception in their own minds,” he wrote. His grim point: That’s what’s going to happen with health care.

Still, I can’t help feeling that this political scientist’s prediction leaves something out: the importance of the specific subject on which people dig in their heels. Few of us ever get up close and personal with the federal budget. Illness and health care, on the other hand, hit as close as it comes: your own body and those of the people you love. Right now, both support for and opposition to reform have been mobilized by abstractions — security versus freedom, equity versus individual responsibility. So capacious are these concepts that it’s no wonder arguments get confounded: hatred of Big Pharma expressed in the same breath as defense of the insurance companies’ “right” to do business without regulation, or the now-immortal demand, “Keep your government hands off my Medicare!”

The political scientist seems to be saying that emotions will outmatch reason every time. But my mother’s contradictory analysis — people are rational; people are irrational — is not so contradictory after all. As I’ve pointed out before, emotion can either abet or undermine reason. Neurologists like Antonio Damasio have shown that people whose emotional brains are impaired can’t make rational decisions.

The job, then, is to counter bad ideas with better ones. But first, you have to supplant destructive emotions with constructive ones.

Understandable feelings may be treated gently. But then there’s hysteria, flaming not just from the websites of the insurrectionist fringe, but also from GOP members drawing salaries for their jobs on Capitol Hill. If only more Democrats had Barney Frank’s courage in calling madness by its name. Recall the town hall meeting this summer where he replied to a woman comparing Obama to Hitler: “On what planet do you spend most of your time?” Not to worry; there will be ample opportunity for Frankness in the future.

Some of the fear — itself a fount of some of the nastiest emotions — may dissipate as people realize health care reform won’t change their lives much, if at all. That’s what happened to the opposition to civil unions after the bill passed in Vermont. A few years later, gay marriage faced the merest of resistance.

But of course we hope health care reform will change people’s lives, for the better. For that to happen, supporters must protect the congressional majority: Vote. This includes the 20 percent of Americans who, according to a Gallup poll, dislike the new law because it doesn’t go far enough. It won’t go any further if Republicans control Washington. (For its part, Washington had better make the new system work, or we’re sunk.)

In the long run, health care reform has to win hearts, and only then will minds follow. Already, minds are following hearts, in the wrong direction (see above: “Keep your government hands off my Medicare!”)

How do hearts change? With experience. On that score, it’s a race for time: Enough good experience must accrue before the opponents can disable the law’s power to deliver it.

As it happens, in the same weeks when the Democrats were scrambling for votes, my family was getting a taste of what medical care might feel like in the new era. Mom suffered another stroke, which left her half-paralyzed, too tired to open her eyes and unable to swallow. She’d long ago nixed a feeding tube or other extraordinary life-extending measures. It was time to discontinue her meds and let her die.

We called in hospice. Along with her longtime caregivers, hospice doctors, nurses, social workers and aides helped us make my mother feel comfortable and safe. We felt safe, too: We could phone in 24 hours a day for advice about anything from constipation to crematory services. If we needed someone to come, they came. Without our asking, they showed up regularly at my mother’s apartment and hung around until we were ready for them to leave. They treated all of us, most of all Mom, with respect and kindness; to a person, they were competent and knowledgeable.

Medicare paid for everything from doctors and drugs to diapers. When Mom died, hospice called the funeral services and arranged for the death certificates to be signed. A bereavement counselor got in touch a few days later. We received a condolence card, signed by Mom’s whole team.

I’m not under the illusion that this is what health care will be like after reform. Part of what makes hospice great is its philosophy that medicine should enhance care, not the other way around. Americans’ attitudes toward high-tech, have-it-all medicine will have to change, too — the subject of another column.

But, aside from the kindness and competence and good sense, what made my mother’s dying extraordinarily easier was this: Not once did we talk about money. That is enough to make a person love American health care.

Lately reborn as a defender of justice at Guantánamo, Coakley is a leading legal light among sex-panic witch hunters. As Middlesex county district attorney and, since 1997, Massachusetts attorney general, she rose to prominence via the tireless prosecution of crimes that never happened: satanic ritual abuse of toddlers at the hands of daycare teachers, bizarre grandparental incest, and unfounded priestly pedophilia.

Coakley has tried and won these cases employing always dubious and now widely renounced investigatory tactics and junk forensic “science,” notably “repressed memory” theory. She has enlisted public hysteria, attacked her marks in the media, and fought like a Tasmanian devil to keep people behind bars long after they’ve been exonerated. In short, she has used her office to demolish the lives of many innocent people.

Throughout the Senate campaign, Coakley’s liberal supporters kept this record under wraps. Perhaps they feared jinxing an increasingly ill-fated run. My own suspicions are darker: that the Left does not care about sex-crimes enforcement, which may comprise the worst injustices of a brutal criminal system. This isn’t just because there’s no political advantage in standing up for suspected deviants. It’s because progressives are implicated in the creation of this sex panic, and even those who might be sympathetic to its victims don’t understand it.

Coakley made national headlines in 1997 for her role in convicting 19-year-old British nanny Louise Woodward for the shaking death of her charge Matthew Eappen. The evidence was slim that the defendant killed the baby — much less intentionally — but Coakley’s crew wanted to lock her up for life. The jury convicted on its only option, second-degree murder. The judge reduced the charge to manslaughter and the sentence to time served. Woodward returned to England disgraced, and Coakley rode the case to statewide office.

But Woodward was not the first trophy in Coakley’s misguided child-protective crusade. Her hand was heavy in two of the most notorious, and globally condemned, false-allegation cases of the daycare and satanic abuse panics. In 1993, Coakley railroaded Lowell residents Ray and Shirley Souza for molesting their grandchildren. The charges, which included abusing the kids with what they described as a machine as big as a room and forcing them to drink a green potion, were born in the therapeutically exhumed “recovered memories” of the Souzas’ eldest daughter and spread to infect the rest of the family.

Shortly after her election as attorney general in 1997, Coakley threw her power into trying to keep three innocents behind bars forever. Violet Amirault, 60, and her adult son and daughter Gerald Amirault and Cheryl LeFave were the proprietors of the highly regarded Fells Acres daycare center until they were swept up in the daycare panics. In 1984 a kangaroo court convicted them of abominations ranging from the anal rape of a 4-year-old with a butcher knife (which left no injury) to the severing of a squirrel’s legs in broad daylight (also unnoticed by anyone). By 1995, the patent falsity of these claims moved a judge to order a new trial and release the imprisoned women. Although Coakley had not prosecuted the case, she fought ferociously to send them back. Violet died of cancer, waiting. In 2000, the Massachusetts Governor’s Board of Pardons and Parole recommended commutation of Gerald’s sentence, citing lack of evidence of charges they called “extraordinary if not bizarre.” Coakley persuaded Acting Governor Jane Swift to reject the panel’s advice.

The Souzas served decades; Ray died and Shirley, still protesting her innocence, is a registered sex offender. So is Gerald Amirault, released in 2004.

Coakley also turned her zeal against “pedophile priests” — unfortunately, ones who were not guilty. In 1994, she insisted on prosecuting Father Paul Manning for molestation, even though the 11-year-old alleged victim said nothing happened. When the jury acquitted, Coakley went on TV to try to convict Manning there.

In 2002, Coakley presided over the crucifixion of Father Paul Shanley, painted as the most depraved of Boston’s disgraced priests. The case was tainted by sensationalist press coverage, multimillion-dollar pretrial settlements by the Church, and wingnut “experts” lending scientific sheen to repressed-memory theory, long invalidated by research and professional critique. Shanley was convicted solely on the accuser’s muddled memories — sparked by reading the Boston Globe — and sentenced to 12 to 15 years, a likely life sentence for the defrocked priest, now 79.

Not surprisingly, in 2004 Coakley opposed efforts to create a state innocence commission, calling the idea “backward-looking instead of forward-looking.” Of course, that’s the point: to look back and redress wrongful convictions, two dozen of which have been overturned in Massachusetts. But Coakley never admits a wrong.

Massachusetts offers extreme cases of official collusion in mass sexual hysteria, going back to the Salem witch trials. But it is hardly alone: The nation is united in its war on perverts, making little distinction between violent rapists and teen sexters. Nor is Coakley the only law enforcer who has refused to make amends for the innocent lives she has ruined. Prosecutorial careers are built on such victories.

Yet, with few exceptions, progressives have kept their mouths shut about these injustices. For instance, the ACLU’s 2010 Workplan aims to dismantle “the Guantánamo Bay System of Injustice” and rein in excessive government surveillance. Yet it ignores the gulag of postprison psychiatric lockups and the parole requirements imposed on former sex offenders.

Why?

Of all “progressives,” feminists are most to blame. Feminists “discovered” rape and incest in the 1970s. This is good. But sexual conservatives in the women’s movement soon allied with the moral Right and law-and-order zealots to overblow the prevalence of sexual crime, particularly against children, and to oversimplify its traumatic potential. Both causes and effects of these exaggerations are the quack science, relaxed evidentiary rules, broadened statutory definitions and overlong sentences that pervade sex-offense policy and practice.

But liberals don’t generally listen to feminists. In fact, the male (now old) New Left condemned feminists and other cultural radicals for splintering solidarity and distracting activists from serious — that is, economic — matters. You need only peruse left-wing publications such as The Nation, the Huffington Post or The American Prospect to see that sex is an afterthought in their definition of politics.

Why does the Left avoid sexual politics? For one thing (and here’s reason two it won’t deal with sex law), it is desperate to look moral. Spooked by the Right’s monopoly on “family values,” progressives in the 1980s strove to seize upstanding morality as their own. Soon we had the Working Families Party and Families USA. Queers went normal and flocked to the altar, with progressives throwing the rice. In a “pro-family” agenda, there is no room for defending people accused, even wrongly, of incest or sex with minors. Indeed, one of the more distressing aspects of the priest scandals was the Boston gay community’s abandonment — nay, denunciation — of embattled clerics like Shanley, who had admitted to earlier sex with teenagers. This was even more painful given the city’s extraordinary brotherhood of gay adults and youth in the sexual liberation struggles of the past.

Third, besides Marcusians, Reichians and a few other marginals, progressive politicos are rationalists; they’ve been snail-like in grasping the emotional roots of political behavior. Part of progressives’ fealty to Reason is their antagonism to religion. A willingness to believe the worst about Catholics, journalist JoAnn Wypijewski points out, contributed to the Left’s piling on to vilify the accused priests.

Fourth, with the exception of anarchists, the Left trusts government. State child protection was invented during the Progressive Era. Fifty years later, feminist therapists, lawyers, and antiviolence activists — who had historically mistrusted the police — joined with law enforcers to turn child-protection agencies into machines of sexual reeducation and punishment. Meanwhile, many vocal critics of sex-crimes laws are right-wing libertarians, including Christians, whose children have been caught under the sexual surveillance regime. These people don’t trust the government to do much, least of all raise kids. They may believe that teen sex is wrong, but that doesn’t mean they want the cops slapping handcuffs on their sons.

Finally, criminal justice activists don’t recognize sex-crimes defendants among those ordinarily oppressed by the prison-industrial complex. A class-race analysis doesn’t work. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 1996 70 percent of offenders incarcerated for crimes against children were white (of these, seven in 10 committed a sexual assault), compared with 40 percent of those who’d offended against adults. A quarter of convicted child abusers were over 40, compared with 10 percent of violent criminals whose victims were adults. And, while statistics don’t offer easy substantiation here, sex offenders appear to have more money and education than do their cellblock confrères. A cyber-nerd downloading child porn is unlikely to be a 19-year-old African American high school dropout. Only recently have prisoners’ and human rights advocates begun to attack the draconian penalties meted out to sex offenders.

Condemning the pro-choice, pro-health-care Martha Coakley for hunting witches may sound like single-issue politics. But her ambitious vengeance and embrace of junk science say everything about her; ignoring all that says a lot about her supporters. It is long past time that progressives demand of their leaders a commitment to justice — even for those they despise.

This piece originally ran in  Seven Days.

I’m in excellent company, including Joanne Wypijewski, for her brilliant “Carnal Knowledge” column in the Nation.

You can find out more about the awards and link to all the winning articles here.

You’d think we’d be happy. Less uncomfortable breast squishing and a few bucks saved on health care (though the panel reviewed only clinical, not economic, data). Trustworthy players in the breast biz were delighted. The radical advocates’ group Breast Cancer Action, for one, had long warned women of the risks and oversold benefits of mammograms. The renowned breast doctor and feminist Susan Love also welcomed the new guidelines.

So did I. Having endured two painful, scary and probably unnecessary biopsies, I’d been putting off my next mammogram to avoid another biopsy — my own defensive medicine. I’m sure I wasn’t the only woman in this pickle.

But then women, and their presumptive friends, rose up. Republicans — those famous champions of women’s rights — spread rumors of a Democrat-insurance industry conspiracy to save pennies on the backs of women. The press fanned the uproar. TV reporters strode down hospital hallways beside oncologists, who worriedly condemned the new advice; an “expert panel” — all radiologists — also nixed it. Unlike Democratic bean counters and insurance lobbyists, these docs were exonerated of any self-interest. Soon a Gallup/USA Today poll reported widespread “anger” among women, many of whom planned to ignore the guidelines. (Respondents also overestimated the likelihood of getting breast cancer in one’s forties by as much as 50 times.)

Within days, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius was dissociating the government from its own panel’s recommendations. And a week later, Delaware Democratic Senator Barbara Mikulski proposed an amendment to the health care bill guaranteeing free screenings for women — not just yearly mammograms starting in their forties but also tests for such killers as heart disease and diabetes. Most liberals supported the amendment, which passed 61 to 39.

Then another assault on a women’s health “need” surfaced: a proposed tax on elective cosmetic surgery to raise health care revenue. Middlebury College sociology professor (and my friend) Laurie Essig, whose forthcoming book American Plastic investigates the collaboration of the cosmetic surgery and consumer credit industries, blogged onTrue/Slant against the tax. You can’t say whether cosmetic surgery is “necessary” or not, she said, given the tough labor and romance markets and women’s place in them: “If someone is so depressed about the size of their boobs or their nose or their back fat that they stop going to work or school, is the surgery necessary?” Essig noted that such self-improvement is not the province of privilege anymore — a third of cosmetic surgery patients earn less than $30,000 — so the surcharge would be regressive, like cigarette taxes.

Similar outrage emanated from the National Organization for Women. Middle-age women “have to find work,” NOW President Terry O’Neill told the New York Times. “And they are going for Botox or going for eye work, because the fact is we live in a society that punishes women for getting older.” O’Neill decried women’s inferior pay (as of the last census, 70 percent of American working women earned less than $20,000 a year) and higher health care premiums. “And now they are going to put a tax on middle-aged women in a society that devalues them for being middle aged?” she wailed.

(I was starting to feel a sympathetic hot flash coming on for my Botox-deprived sisters, when it occurred to me there might be a silver lining to women being crowded into the crappy end of the job market: You don’t need an eyelid tuck to get hired as a chambermaid.)

Where does this entitlement end? Last week’s Times Style section reported on a cosmetic procedure in which fat is transferred from a hefty body part — say, the thighs — to a scrawnier site, usually the breasts. The few docs who do the operation admit there are risks — “oil cysts, masses, nodules and scarring,” for example (and sometimes the breasts just “go away”). But here’s another problem: The immigrant fat can cause little chips of calcium to form in the breasts, and these can confound radiological readings. A “baseline” mammogram must be done before the fat transfer. The calcifications are harmless, but they sometimes signal cancer, so a biopsy may be needed. An elective (or socially necessary?) procedure leads to a necessary (or overly cautious?) one. Will Mikulski’s amendment cover these tests, too?

Essig is right that the line between necessary and elective is not clear. But if health reform is to be sustainable, effective and fair, we’re going to have to draw it. She suggests the taxes on cosmetic surgery should be levied on surgeons and credit companies, not patients. I agree that the rich should pay more to support the health care of those who have less. But taxes won’t cover it all. There will be rationing. Indeed, there should be rationing — also known as rational choosing between interventions that are needed and those that are only wanted; those that justify the risks and costs and those that don’t.

We do not have such a rational policy now, and the mammogram debate highlights the dysfunctional hybrid we do have — a “free-market” health care “system” driven by profit and consumer demand, with a soupçon of recognition of the right to care thrown in. So if the patient wants (or is persuaded to want) a procedure, and if she can afford (or finance) it, then she should have it, we apparently believe, whether it is a nose job at age 12 or a triple bypass at 92. Now we are making the transition to health care as a public good, not a private luxury — and, guess what, we can’t have it all. We’ll have to stop acting like spoiled customers at Saks.

Women should also heed the feminist health movement’s time-tested skepticism of medicine, rather than adopting the dubious notion that all troubles are biological and should be fixed medically. Maybe that gal immobilized by back fat should take a vigorous walk every day, tutor at a public school or, hey, join NOW. For its part, NOW should quit defending her right to liposuction and start changing her — and men’s — consciousness about age and beauty. Until that distant goal is won, feminists should hammer the government to fine the bejeezus out of employers who practice age or sex discrimination.

As for gender discrimination in health care, the reform bill would outlaw it, including higher insurance premiums for women.

In the health care debate, as in all politics, it is politically useful to slice the population into competing interest groups — old people, children, kidney dialysis patients, cancer sufferers — and win support bit by bit. But such Balkanization is antithetical to integrated policy; it undermines the goal of reform, which is to promote everyone’s well-being.

Plus, such tactics can backfire. The GOP has belatedly become the defender of Medicare. But, mark my words: It will use the cost of Medicare as a reason to vote against reform. The price tag of Mikulski’s amendment — about a billion dollars over 10 years — is another arrow in the opponents’ quiver. And if reform passes with the amendment intact, the costs of elective tests for worried-well female patients will come out of someone else’s care. Men also die of cancer, heart disease and diabetes. Must they get their own amendment?

There is, however, one medical procedure unique to women that cannot be jettisoned in the compromises reform will call for: abortion. Pregnancy happens only to women. Motherhood changes everything. These realities have been at the root of women’s oppression since the beginning of time. Without control over our own reproduction, women can never achieve equality.

This makes it all the more depressing that women are up in arms about their rights to unnecessary mammograms, and only the stalwart pro-choice organizations have mobilized against the House’s Stupak-Pitts amendment (a similar one from Nebraska Democratic Ben Nelson was defeated Tuesday in the Senate), which would effectively wipe out insurance coverage for the termination of an unwanted pregnancy. Such limited protest makes abortion look like the single-issue fetish of a few, rather than a bottom-line right for all women, whether they choose to exercise it or not. Compare Congress’ response to this tepid resistance — numerous putatively pro-choice Democrats voted for Stupak-Pitts — with the stampede to support Mikulski.

Health care reform will force us to sort needs from desires. Since we can’t have everything, we have to pick our battles. A nose job is an elective procedure; it is, frankly, not worth defending. A just-in-case mammogram is an elective procedure. We should cherish our mammo-free years.

And, unless the woman’s life or health is at stake, an abortion is also a medically elective procedure. But, socially, politically and existentially, the right to have an abortion — and the affordability and accessibility on which the right depends — is not elective. Abortion is necessary to women’s equality; it is necessary to women’s freedom. Abortion is necessary to more than women’s health.

This piece originally ran in Seven Days.

After that, we instituted a new element in the training: a sort of rehearsal, and a cheer for ourselves — some newbies, some veterans — all abysmally underpaid. “Everybody now,” I’d coach. “That sounds a little low to me!” The participants would start doubtfully: “That sounds a little…” repeating the mantra a little louder, a little more confidently each time. It wasn’t easy for these people to stand up for themselves; I often choked on those seven words myself. We were all accustomed to abjection as the quotidian condition of our work lives; we feared losing assignments if we pushed too hard. But we kept trying to drive the peon from our souls.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose — only worse. The buck a word I got in 1981, worth about 40 cents today, has been halved and halved again at most publications, especially the e-zines. A new web service called Demand, which supplies articles and videos in response to Google searches, pays writers $15 for a story of a few hundred words and videographers $20 a clip. If rejected, the piece garners a 15 percent kill fee — $2.25.

Writers are not the only ones swallowing big pay cuts. Pilots are working for half their former salaries. In its last negotiations, the United Auto Workers agreed to let GM and Chrysler pay new hires half the $28 an hour that current workers make. A Georgia state worker writing to the New York Times saw wage cuts and mandatory furloughs slice 45 percent from her salary this year.

But if demi-salaries still weigh too heavily on balance sheets in these hard times, there’s a new wage level: zilch. This week, Times columnist Bob Herbert wroteabout recent college graduates who, unable to find jobs, are taking internships instead — sometimes one after another — with the aspiration of gaining experience and maybe even paid work down the line. Anya Kamenetz, the author of Generation Debt, has been noticing this trend for a few years, and she sees evidence that the interns’ hopes are tragically misguided. Corporations are creating internships and cutting entry-level positions at increasing rates, she says. In other words, the interns are replacing the very sort of workers they would hope to become.

The losers are not just those interns, though. In a 2006 piece called “Take This Internship and Shove It,” Kamenetz compared unpaid interns to illegal immigrants: “They create an oversupply of people willing to work for low wages, or, in the case of interns, literally nothing.” That hurts all workers.

Internships aren’t only the province of penniless nonprofits or the public sector. Go to any job site, and you will find real estate, PR, IT and other for-profit companies trawling for candidates to do what look like regular jobs, with the minor difference that there is no paycheck — or only the suggestion that there might be one if the person plays his or her cards right. “Internships are unpaid,” notes a post from a New York animation and video design studio. “However, we can arrange mechanisms that will compensate upon attainment of specific goals.” I know a guy in Chinatown who can get you a similar deal.

Yes, some internships train people; some degrees, such as law, require them. Indeed, college students have long complained that only wealthy kids can take the unpaid positions, so the system further advantages the already advantaged. But internships aren’t just for college students — or even for entry-level trainees — anymore. A Detroit events planner called TOYL Events advertises an internship whose “ideal candidate” would have a résumé showing “proven success in meeting and exceeding sales goals, building strong client partnerships, breaking new business and uncovering qualified prospects for new business.” The company’s website cautions candidates not to bother applying unless “[you] are comfortable with working with limited supervision and being supervised by other interns in a group setting.”

This looks like a blatant violation of one of the federal Fair Labor Standards Act’s six criteria for legitimate internships, which stipulates that “trainees do not displace regular employees, but work under close observation.” The law also requires for-profit companies to pay a trainee at least minimum wage.

The FLSA’s criteria boil down to one question, says Vermont Department of Labor legal counsel Dirk Anderson: “Who benefits? Does the program give the intern some kind of valuable job skill or further their education? Or is the employer just getting somebody to do something for free that they normally would pay someone to do?” A lot of the internships I found online appeared to hail from the far side of the law.

You’d think that by the second or third dead-end placement, somebody might get peeved. Yet spokespeople for both the state and federal labor departments told me they aren’t hearing it. At unfairinternships.com, one of the few places where resentment is surfacing, a commenter stated the obvious reason: “Nothing can be done to enforce the labor laws unless the unpaid intern files a complaint. And since those working unpaid internships are doing so to build their résumé and network in their field, they are extremely unlikely to do that. They would be cutting off their noses to spite their faces.”

So there it is, the same worry that held back my writers union trainees from asking an editor for a few more dollars.

But I suspect there’s more silencing these exploited workers than mere terror or the delusion of someday inspiring their bosses to give up the efficiency of free labor for the inconvenience of a wage.

The impediment is gratitude.

Now, gratitude is a virtuous emotion, said to relieve stress and make you happier. So, by all means, be thankful for your cat, your curly hair or your kid’s decision to leave home. But gratitude can be misplaced. I used to tell the trainees that whether you are stuffing tacos or writing deathless prose, no one is doing you a favor by hiring you. You are providing words to fill the publisher’s pages; he needs those pages to make a profit. He is not your benefactor; he is your boss.

I had a slogan then: “Lose gratitude.” And, no matter how beaten down or upbeat I may feel now, I do not mistake affection for an editor or the pleasure of a good assignment well and collaboratively realized for that other one-way, warm fuzziness.

I’d be stupid not to worry about the financial well-being of my employers, not just for myself but because publishing provides a crucial public service. But the wage cutters aren’t all hurting. According to Wired magazine, Demand Media is on track to take in about $200 million in revenue this year; “its most recent round of financing by blue-chip investors valued the company at $1 billion.” Ford’s union voted down a concessionary contract, rejecting in particular a no-strike clause. This caused much consternation among business gurus. A week later, the company announced solidly profitable earnings projections for 2011.

If Ford doesn’t realize those projections, labor, not management, will take the blame. But the blame for what? Isn’t there something screwy about saving a corporation that cannot pay its workers? What is an economy for, anyway?

If Ford founders, people will say, “They should have been grateful for the job, any job.” A 24-year-old employee of a Washington agency I promised not to name — let’s just say it’s an agency whose employees should know better — defended unpaid internships on the same principle: that interns should be thankful for the “great job experience.” The best place to get job experience, I replied, is on a job, the essence of which is the exchange of responsibility for compensation. Take away the latter half of the equation and what’s left is volunteerism. Fine: Pitch in at a soup kitchen. But there’s a word for unpaid labor for someone else’s profit, undertaken under duress (like today’s economy) or false pretenses. That word is slavery.

This young man shares an increasingly common belief: If work provides rewards such as mentorship, public recognition or even satisfaction, money needn’t come into it. Every industry has its way of exploiting this fiction. Mine has blogging, which, the writer is assured, may lead to something.

I’ll tell you what all this unpaid work is leading to: more unpaid work.

And if we keep our mouths shut and end up working nights to support our day jobs, we will have no one to be grateful to but ourselves.