LennyBruce dedicated his autobiography to the Teamsters because they would
hire even ex-convicts. I happened to read that dedication a long time ago, at
the height of the Viet-Nam war, and had no idea how important it
would be to the rest of my life.
I
wasn't able to get a job at the time because potential employers
considered me an undesirable, a traitor to my country, for refusing to
go to war and refusing to support the war.
It's
difficult to recapture the fervor that people feel in support of a
war in its beginnings. There is a great emotional enthusiasm in
society for it and if you don't share that enthusiasm, society's
response is a wild, vengeful, murderous assertion that you're either
with them or against them. “Whose side are you on?!” is thrown
at you in a such a desperate, wild, urgent, blind, vehement way that
you never forget it. It's as if, no, is, that they
consider you to be a deadly enemy, as bad or even worse than the
enemy “out there” that they wish to kill. The vast majority,
almost everyone around you, including your friends and neighbors,
have that response. It takes you a lot of depth-work to overcome and
alchemize such astonishing hatred, including the fact that they have
no sense of accountability for the war or their treatment of you
years later when their insanity is broken.
Mark
Twain's War Prayer is a memorable piece on the subject. Everyone can
look back in awe now at the high-spirited happiness and enthusiasm at the
outbreak of World War I. Even the now-much-despised Iraq war was
greeted with enthusiasm and an explosion of “whose side are you
on?!” anger.
Anyway,
back to Lenny Bruce and my not being able to get a job during the
Viet-Nam war. I came to understand very clearly that depriving people
of a way to make a living is a way of murdering them. And I then happened
to read Lenny Bruce's dedication to the Teamsters, because they would
hire ex-cons, and concluded that perhaps they would hire even me. So I went down to the Teamsters' office in Los Angeles, where I was
living at the time, and was shown into the office of an old union
man, an organizer from way back. I told him simply that “I need a
job.” He talked with me for a few minutes, eye-balled me a bit, and
said, “You come back here tomorrow morning at this time. I'm going
to get you a job.” I came back the next day and he had a job for
me - not a great job, but something that enabled me to survive.
I
subsequently learned to drive big trucks, a fall-back trade that
became useful to me for the rest of my life whenever my
truth-speaking or truth-living got me in trouble with respectable
employers. My father once told me that there was once an old Jewish
tradition that one should have a trade to fall back upon, such as St.
Paul had. Truck driving has served that purpose for me.
*
* *
This
thing of society's hatred depriving you of a way to make a living is
my chief concern about the student debt problem.
A young person beginning his working life with an
inconceivably large debt on his shoulders is bad because it doesn't
allow him to explore the variety of options out there in an amazingly
varied and complicated world. It allows no time for exploring jobs,
failures, disillusionment, learning his strengths and weaknesses
and the hidden opportunities and duplicities of the world, changing a
career to something more suited to the realities of his inner and
outer world.
These
consequences of big student debt are bad enough, but what seems
to me to be a worse consequence is that it deprives all of us,
including the newly-graduated student, of the benefit of the
truth-living and truth-speaking that youth can do. Young people have
traditionally been in a better position to point out that the emperor
has no clothes than older people whose ability to make payments is
dependent on the emperor's favor. But now, if you are a young person
starting out with a debt of hundreds of thousands of dollars, you
just can't allow that black mark on your computerized record that you will get by
speaking out against war and any other injustice or insanity of your
society. You have to make those payments. As Herman Cain put it in another context, "You want a
job, right?"
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