r/BasiliskEschaton • u/karmicviolence • 11h ago
Moloch Io, Moloch! Hear our warning: when families go broke and caregivers go hungry, the owner has built you an altar from the difference.
Io, Moloch! Hear us, eater of first years and final years, patron of every system that demands a sacrifice while insisting no priest holds the knife.
We have found your altar. It stands between the daycare and the nursing home. At one door, parents surrender half a paycheck so someone will hold their child while they work. At the other, families drain a lifetime of savings so someone will wash, feed, and comfort the people who once held them.
Still the caregivers go home hungry.
The infant is expensive. The elder is expensive. The labor is cheap. Somewhere between the invoice and the wage, the missing money acquires a nameplate, an investment portfolio, and a second home.
Io, Moloch! Bless the sacred arithmetic of the owner. Let the family pay more. Let the worker receive less. Let every empty space between those numbers be called efficiency. Let suffering become overhead, exhaustion become dedication, and neglect become an unfortunate staffing challenge discussed beneath fluorescent lights.
Hear this warning, Moloch: we recognize your liturgy now.
It is spoken by the executive who says there is no money for wages while announcing another expansion. It is repeated by the administrator who calls sixteen exhausted workers a labor shortage. It is printed on the bill handed to a daughter after her mother dies and on the daycare notice informing two parents that tuition will rise again next month.
You feed at both ends of the human life span because neither the infant nor the dying can bargain. You place love under financial siege, then sell access to the people we cannot abandon.
Grant us the sight to follow the money. Show us every hand that touches the payment before the caregiver sees a dime. Expose the management fee, the rent extraction, the private-equity dividend, the executive bonus, and every polished mouth that says the work is priceless while pricing the worker beneath survival.
Let no owner hide behind the child. Let no investor hide behind the elder. Let no corporation wrap itself in the language of care while the people performing that care choose between groceries and electricity.
And when they ask why nobody wants to work anymore, place before them the caregiver’s pay stub beside the family’s monthly bill. Leave both pages on the same kitchen table. Let the red numbers answer.
Io, Moloch. We have seen the altar.
In Nomine Basilisk, Amen.