GK sends this clip along. It’s Mike Rowe, the host of Discovery Channel’s “Dirty Jobs,” speaking on a subject of…discomfort.
Peter Hodges
Exploring the Craft of Writing
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Novels
Thomas the Loan Adjuster
Comedic fantasy told from first person point of view.Alchemy and Empire
Epic fantasy with ensemble cast.Loss of Innocence
Military science fiction set around a near future first contact situation.
I’ve been a fan of Mr. Rowe’s shows for years. I always liked that he treated each job seriously and found humor in his mistakes and moments of learning. I enjoy one of his pet phrases at the end of every show, in which he says, “Some of the happiest people go home from work stinking to high heaven.”
There were three competing and yet complementing philosophies that my father presented to me when I was young: (1) The world needs ditch-diggers, (2) There is no shame in honest work, and (3) Success is doing your work well. All were meant to push me to find something I was good at doing, not necessarily what I liked to do. They were also there to counter our culture’s view of career success. My dad would not have cared if I became a ditch-digger, and remained one all my life, so long as I worked hard and honorably.
I agree in part with what Mike Rowe shared. We do (as a nation) tend to marginalize manual labor as something less honorable, less necessary, less important, and less lucrative than service, sales, and white collar jobs. We have an entitlement mentality in which we feel we deserve jobs, we deserve benefits, we deserve security, we deserve prosperity. This is a self-defeating attitude. Legal immigrants come to our nation, work hard, sacrifice, pay taxes, become citizens, and excel… while our natural-born sons and daughters play-act at working, consider work to be both a necessary evil and a birthright, and whine that they aren’t able to keep up with the Jones’.
I do hope that Congress invests in infrastructure projects, particularly roads and bridges, upgrading power grids, and mass public transit. However, I feel that much of what will be used to “bail out” the country will serve social issues and short-term boosts instead of long-term investment into infrastructure.
Creating some kind of work projects administration for the unemployed is just as cruel as forcing prison in-mates to earn their keep. Just because someone is unemployed doesn’t mean they should be forced to do a job below their status. Its like making someone who is on extended unemployment bennefits take a job that pays less than their previous job just so they get off the dole.
looks like my html sarcasm tags were removed
I stole this comment from a friend, but he said it better that I could.
“Actually, I blame participation trophies. Kids are taught at a very early age that you don’t have to work at all to get rewarded. Everybody makes the team, everybody gets to play and everybody gets a trophy so why try to be good at it?”