Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

Keran, a Welsh friend, says that one of the stark memories of his childhood in Wales is of his grandfather often crying before his shift going down into the coal mines near Cardiff.

I recognize his grandfather's feeling from some of my own job experiences even though I have had more choices available to me than he probably had. But I recognize the feeling right away from having unloaded fiber insulation from boxcars, having boxed plastic bottles rapidly all night as they were spit out of a molding machine, and having taught in a high school. Death would definitely be better than some of the more than forty jobs I've held over the course of my life.

Robert Burns once said that he could conceive no worse picture than that of a man, looking for work but Thoreau had it that looking for work should be considered a sport.

Thoreau wrote that “You must get your living by loving,” which also seems like a hard teaching and I find a certain impulse inside me to feel that Thoreau's empathy with humans was less impressive than his empathy with nature. But then I know that Thoreau was not shallow.

There are two considerations that give me pause in agreeing with Thoreau and which I have often debated within me over the years.

One is the consideration of having a family to support. I expected my academic colleagues to speak truth to power with me while I was teaching but the representative criticism I received for that came from one of my fellow sociologists who said: “You are right, but you can't ask me to stick my neck out. I have a family to support.” The same might be said of Thoreau, that he could easily talk of taking work as sport because he didn't have a family to support.

The other consideration I have debated within me over the years is whether or not the prostitution involved, doing a job for the money rather than love, was worse than just not surviving at all. Fooling oneself, lying to oneself, on the issue is easy but may probably be the real death.

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