When I contemplate our wonderful economic system, with its built in unemployment, downsizing, low pay, long hours, tediousness, inequality, and just sometimes downright cruelty, I am reminded of the sign that the Nazis hung up over the gates of Auschwitz, "Work Will Set You Free". This is doubly horrible, not just because of its disgusting taunting of the Jewish prisoners who would be worked to death, but also of the desiccation of something sacred. You see, God created work to set you free. Work, when we are in tune with the sacred, is indeed glorious. Work does indeed set us free. Even Sigmund Freud stated that the two human needs are love and creative work. And we human beings, deep down, love to work. After all, what is a hobby? Its the work that you do when you get away from that job that's boring the living piss out of you. So many of us hate our jobs, so much that the comparison to a Nazi death camp does not seem so outrageous. Our system for too many souls, is a perversion of something that our Creator intended to be glorious.
Am I being too harsh? What about the abomination that is unemployment? We have become much too accepting of this grievous social sin. With our flimsy social safety net in the United States, the specter of unemployment has become a club to terrify the masses into submission. If you lose your job, you better get one quickly, or you might lose your spouse, your family and your friends. In these Great Recession times, everyone knows someone who life has been destroyed by unemployment. People know damm well that if you lose your job you will be stigmatized as lazy. It will be treated like it was your own fault. Get off your ass and beat the pavement! There are plenty of jobs out there! It does absolutely no good to say that, no there are not plenty of jobs out there, no matter how truthful that is.. You will be stigmatized. Or there might be some jobs out there, but they don't want to hire you. Because there is something wrong with you. You are unemployed! Welcome to being a social leper, buddy! Better get a job quickly, or you will be assumed to be unemployable. You will be assumed to have lost your skills, whatever that means. You will find out very quickly about a society that loves to divide people into winners and losers, because baby, you are one of the losers. The people who are most afraid of becoming losers themselves will be the ones to heap the most misery on you. Unless of course, your loving family gets there first. I once faced a troublesome period of unemployment, and it was always my dear old dad who got in front of the line and bashed me with those clichés that make the tormenter think they are oh so wise and profound. Get a job! I don't care if you have to shovel shit! GET A FUCKING JOB! I wanted so much to say to him, hey dad, I would love to! Just show me the pile of shit and I'll shovel it! But nobody is going to pay me to shovel shit. Nobody wants to pay me for ANYTHING! But I said nothing about his unfair criticism. Because I didn't want to make him mad. Because I needed him for help. Because I was fucking unemployed.
At least I was spared the horror of having my wife leave me, like some of my friends. Because in the good old USA of 2015, everything is a market, even the market for spouses. Trade in that loser for a shiny new model, one that has a good job. In a world that thinks that God is dead, there is no consequence for such casual cruelty. And everyone knows it. The elites especially know it. They always make sure the threat of unemployment is always over the workers heads. Want to unionize? Want to be paid more? Want to be treated like a decent human being? Better shut up or you're fired! And all the horror that was described above will become your life. Is it any wonder that so many people are afraid? Is it any wonder unions are dying? I have not even mentioned the productivity that is lost forever to society when talented people cannot find work. Who cares about the damage to society that the lost productivity, despair, and the ruining of people's lives causes? As long as the profits stay high, as long as the elites get theirs, its just fine and dandy. As long as I get mine who cares about the crushed souls?
Another way the elites devalue work is to make us waste time on useless stuff while the very necessary work for strong families and a strong nation gets undone. Imagine a Venn diagram with two circles intersecting. One circle is will be marked "Work that is necessary for the survival of society" . The other is "work some corporation or rich guy will pay you to do" . Or you can just call the second circle "jobs". In a healthy society, the circles would intersect pretty closely. In reality, they are mostly separate, with a small intersection in the middle. The necessary work that keeps a society going is just not getting done in America. Roads and bridges are crumbling. Hospitals are understaffed. The mentally ill are not being treated. The schools are underfunded and kids are not getting educated. People are hungry. The streets teem with homeless. The elderly die neglected and lonely. On and on it goes. We can spend all night listing the very important work that is not getting done in America. Why? Because these very necessary tasks don't make profits for rich people. Is anyone else outraged about all of the good, unemployed people who are forced to sit idle and hungry while the country rots because of neglect? Either the elites don't want to pay for it at all, or usually they pay just enough to keep a half assed system going that becomes more and more useless over time. So there is the poor American worker, trapped in his cubicle, trying to sell something from China people don't need while their kids are not getting taught, their parents are rotting in a nursing home and the neighborhood is going to hell. So we are told that this is the only way to do things, and it you question it, you are a Communist or something. Well, if I was a Communist, and I really wanted to destroy America, I could hardly do worse than what we are doing now.
But really, the worst thing the system has done is to take something holy, like work, and make us hate it. Drudgery and low pay. How many people have spent their working all their lives at a job they hated, dreaming of "retiring" at 65, only to become too sick to enjoy it, or worse, die off before you can retire. Or, some person will love their job, do it well, still be healthy, but told they have to quit at the age of 65. Why have we given up control of something so sacred, so important, and given it all to a small strata of people who don't have our interests at heart? Who would gladly enslave us if they could? It is because we are indeed already slaves, of bad ideas. That's just the way it is. Some things will never change. When we lose our sense of the sacred, we lose the power of the sacred to transform us. God put each one of us on earth with a purpose. It is our God given right to discern that purpose for ourselves. Our work is sacred. Our souls are eternal. A life is too important to waste on someone else's whim. We have allowed ourselves to be enslaved. Dear Lord, give us the strength and wisdom to reclaim our sacred work lives from those who would profane them.
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