Patience with Fools

When it first came out, a friend of mine commented on Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. He did not complain that the Jar Jar Binks character made him want to spew. Instead he complained that this movie continued to reinforce a common theme in today's pop culture -- that if your heart is in the right place, you can succeed without any discipline or preparation, regardless of the difficulty of the task.

He may have had something there. I work with a number of young people at a large national retailer. A few are what I would consider typical youth, using their work experience as a way point on a journey upward. Others, however, will make noise about their plans and ambitions but seem to lack any ability to actually act in the direction of their stated goals. Nice kids, but not real clear on how life really works.

Some of the YouTube comments complain that the author of the video is being mean to aspiring writers. I would say it's fine to encourage those [fill in the blank] who are aspiring even as they work, but we need not have patience with fools. Fools should be slapped in the hopes that it will knock some sense into them.

While I haven't had a conversation exactly like the one in the video below, it made me think of some I might have.



Of course, then there are jaded old farts like me who are working at rebuilding their dreams and plans from the wreckage. C'est la guerre.

(hat tip to Jared Wilson )

Hungry? or just Snacky?

Listening to the radio on one of my looonnnggg drives today. On Point, a pretty good issues and interviews radio show produced by WBUR of Boston had an hour on "Jobs and the Class of 2009." It featured a panel of three recent grads discussing their not too terribly successful attempts at finding work so far. I got the distinct feeling that they weren't so much searching for gainful employment as they were rooting through the refrigerator trying to find something to eat. I noted that none of them seemed truly hungry. They were still at that sort of snacky stage where they knew they wanted something to eat, but weren't quite sure what and they seemed more than willing to stand there with the door propped open until inspiration struck. I wondered how long it would take before pretty much anything mom plopped down in front of them would be the most delicious thing ever.

Of course, this is because the question you face at 24 is very different than the question you face at 46. Early on it's about passion, joy, meaning. How can I find a job that I love? What do I really enjoy doing?

At least, that's the question if you are a middle-class recent college grad who has supportive parents with a basement room with free internet access. On the other hand, when middle aged become a more important descriptor than middle-class; when dependents become a bigger fact than dependence; when you have no financial margin and not even any margarine...the choice becomes simple, although not necessarily easier.

I found the discussion fascinating, but I kept thinking about what these kids will do in 20 years if they find themselves in a similar spot. Probably, like me, they will take a job selling appliances, while launching out on an entrepreneurial adventure just to try to forestall the foreclosure monsters and keep everyone in shoes and oatmeal a little longer. And...be grateful for the opportunity. At a certain point, fulfillment becomes more about a full belly then a full heart.

And that's OK.

Work, Anagnoresis, and Parapeteia

I have a good friend who is a high school teacher. More specifically, he is a Tech Ed teacher. Those of you who are my age or older may wonder what it is that a Tech Ed teacher teaches. According to my friend, Tech Ed (for Technical Education) is the latest phase in the evolution of what we used to know as “Shop.” In my time, it was more formally knows as “Industrial Arts.” This was where kids who were not on a college track learned basic vocational skills usually relating to some kind of trade – metal working, engine repair, wood working and carpentry, machining or drafting, etc. Apparently, these sorts of things are no longer taught in High School. Apparently, schools now seem to want to prepare everyone to go to college. 

OK, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but I think not by much. My friend actually expressed his concern about this at one point. He said, “It used to be that you could graduate from High School and have a good part of the skills you would need to build a house. Not anymore. I’m not sure where someone goes now if he wants to learn to be a carpenter.” 

It is an irony, perhaps, that for all it’s talk about equality of opportunity and diversity, it seems to me that today’s educational establishment is actually becoming much narrower, and trying much harder to fit a wider rang of people into a much tighter channel. I suspect this the case because of a certain prejudice that is overlooked – a prejudice against manual labor. It has become an accepted perspective to view manual labor as almost the equivalent of slavery. It is assumed that if someone digs ditches, paves roads, frames houses, fixes cars, cuts trees, or any number of other forms of actual physical work, that they are most unfortunate, and that the only way to improve their lot is to leave behind their work and become a part of the new information economy. Hence the term “Tech Ed.” It basically means training in the use of computers. 

This misguided philosophy is essentially the pervasive problem of Gnosticism. It’s a tough weed that almost derailed the early church, and is so hardy that it still finds ways to sprout in the bare ground left behind by modern materialism. Somehow the material physical world has become distasteful to the educated people who hold the knowledge of power. The soiling of the hands with real matter is left to ignorant and unfortunate who either don’t know better, or are unable to rise up out of that condition. 

Beyond that, it raises a more concrete problem. It leaves us asking how, if everyone is busy writing computer programs or assembling or managing banks of servers, who will manufacture the circuit boards, build the buildings that house them, or mine the coal and burn it to power those electronic machines?

Mike Rowe, co-creator and host of the Discovery Channel program, Dirty Jobs, addresses this whole question with eloquence and wit. Anybody that can actually talk about how they personally experienced a clear anagnoresis and parapeteia while castrating sheep is worth listening to.