Wednesday, November 23, 2011

A Thanksgiving Message to the Occupiers: Stop Whining and Start Working

Originally posted 11.13.11

A personal story about airplanes, Thanksgiving, root beer, the Occupiers and the historic settlement of Jamestown (they’re connected, you’ll see)

 As one of five children born from the union of a homemaker and a Chicago cop – and an honest cop at that – you know that when I was growing up my family didn’t have much money. We never went on vacations or ate out at restaurants except for rare occasions when one of us might tag along with someone else’s family. Our clothes were usually hand-me-downs once or twice over, and obviously we didn’t have things like computers and cell phones because they weren’t invented yet. As entertainment, my parents used to load us up in our late-model-rescued-from-the junk-yard- station wagon – sans seat belts because they weren’t invented yet, either – and we’d drive to O’Hare Airport to watch the airplanes take off.

 On lush days, we would stop at A & W Root Beer to get root beer floats on our way to the airport, but on lean days we were root beer-less. Looking back, I regret the days when I would beg for root beer floats and thoughtlessly complain when I didn’t get them, oblivious to the fact that it was because my father couldn’t afford it and not because he wanted us to go without. To this day, I love root beer floats and especially the way the outside of the ice cream crusts up with an icy layer of root beer crystals that dissolve in your mouth and how the ice cream itself slowly melts into a rich cream that tickles your mouth with just the right amount of carbonation, creamy but with a kick.

We rarely ventured outside of our neighborhood except for weekend car trips to see my grandmother in Waukegan, so these airport excursions stand out in my memory as colorful breaks from daily routine. We didn’t actually go into the airport, but my father would park the car just beyond a runway so that our car would be near the planes’ path as they began their ascent. The roar of the jet engines would make our car rumble and vibrate and there was always the impression, just before the plane ascended with a mighty roar, that it could crash or run right into us, which made the entire adventure seem dangerous and exciting. I only remember being in the direct path of the runway once and, after that, we would just be near it, probably because my mother wanted us to have the thrill but without the risk, however remote, that the planes actually could actually crash or run into us.

Once, my father took an unusual route to the airport that went beneath the highway. I don’t recall that I had ever even visited a rural area, so just being on a bumpy dirt road was a new experience for me. I was accustomed to pot holes, but this road was so bumpy that our junkyard car’s so-called shock absorbers were outed as imposters. In my memory, it was twilight and everything was brown and muddy but that could just be because the highway above was like a concrete ceiling, blocking the sun.

Above, there were cars and McDonald’s and everything I had ever experienced as supposed civilization, But beneath was a dark world, set apart, where my usual sights and sounds seemed remote.

Our car bumped along until it came to a ramshackle house. Though on a foundation, the house was a heap of boards barely supporting a roof, four walls and a porch, but it seemed to have been there for a long time. A woman sat in a rocking chair on the porch, seething with a suspicion that softened info confusion when she saw a car full of kids.

What I remember most vividly about her, because we laughed about it, was that she sat on the porch holding a fly swatter that had a hole in it. Flies can be pesky buggers that are tough to nail down even with an intact fly swatter, but commandeering a fly swatter with a hole in it seemed like the ultimate exercise in futility.

Maybe she was a squatter, but it seemed clear to me that the house came before the highway. Evidently, that recalcitrant old woman had refused to sell her house or land to the governmental powers that be. They probably offered her more money than the house was worth at the time to no avail and tried to seize it by eminent domain but she refused to budge. Rather than bull doze her down, they just bought up the land around her and built the highway above her, secluding her in a dark, sun deprived netherworld where cars and planes whooshed and rumbled above.

At least that’s my theory and I’m sticking to it.

 Jamestown

 Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in America, established in 1607, was a failure at first. Unlike the religiously motivated and hard-working Pilgrims, who came in 1620, the settlers at Jamestown considered themselves “gentlemen.” They were unaccustomed to hard labor and had been lured to this new land by the prospect of gold and easy riches. Their expectations of easy riches went unrealized and their communal structure provided little incentive for hard work.

As John Smith (in old spelling), lamented, “As at this time were most of our chiefest men either sicke or discontented, the rest being in such dispaire, as they would rather starve and rot with idleness, then be persuaded to do any thing for their owne reliefe without constraint.”

 To top it off, historians believe that a severe drought made life especially harsh and people started getting sick. During the winter of 1610, termed the “starving time,” only 60 out of 500 or more survived.

The communal approached failed, so John Smith issued the mandate that “he who will not work will not eat” -- a phrase which, today, the Jamestown gift shop sells on t-shirts, without acknowledging that Smith borrowed the concept from the Bible, which clearly says in II Thessalonians 3:10 that “If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat.”

Things started to turn around once the men received plots of land they could plant and cultivate for profit. Historically, the desire to carve out a place that you or your family can call your own -- in other words “ownership” -- has proven to be a powerful human motivator that is often closely connected to prosperity, especially when combined with other virtues such as a work ethic, thrift and honesty.

 Unlike the Jamestown settlers, the Pilgrims, who landed in Plymouth in 1620, sought religious freedom. They were prepared to work and sacrifice and managed to eek out a celebratory meal even in the midst of great hardship that they shared with the native inhabitants—a feast that we famously honor every Thanksgiving and remember this week.

 The Occupiers

 More than 400 years after the Jamestown settlers, we have new encampments of modern settlers who set up in public parks. In some ways, I agree with their grievances, but I don’t agree with their approach or their diffuse, whiny rebelliousness. Like the early Jamestown settlers, they have a loose communal structure and an unwillingness to work. Unlike the Jamestown settlers, they have iphones and electronic gadgets to play with and, even though they’re not working, free food keeps coming. Supposedly they’re being fed through spontaneous donations (which I doubt), but this just perpetuates their idleness and sense of entitlement.

 The occupiers that  I've seen are able-bodied, so if want to eat, they should have to work.

Admittedly, the uncertainly created by an overly interventionist government that specializes in shielding people from the consequences of their actions is making it difficult for businesses to grow and hire. Plus, the government – hand-in-hand with a system of crony capitalism (vs. the free market) – has shielded the greedy and corrupt from experiencing the consequences of their actions and that’s wrong. But here’s my unsolicited advice: work anyway. Produce something on your own. Be creative. Contribute.

 Adopt the successful, resourceful mentality of Plymouth, which we celebrate this Thanksgiving and which made this country great, rather than the lazy, entitlement mentality of early Jamestown, which failed.

Ultimately, I’m afraid that we’ve failed to learn our country’s earliest lessons from Jamestown and that the Occupiers are creating a situation where they will be viewed like that recalcitrant, stubborn old woman under the expressway, defying the powers that be and refusing to budge. They may succeed in making their point that life isn’t fair, but I learned that when I was about 4 years old. In the end, they’re just waving a worthless fly swatter with a hole in it.

They need to stop whining and start working. Otherwise, the truly hardworking and industrious will just have to go over or around them and start working to rescue this country from the mess that it’s in.

11.28.13 Addendum

I'm going to leave my original blog intact, but I need to supplement and correct some information.  I wrote correctly about Jamestown because I had visited there, but my information about the original Pilgrims was incomplete. It turns out that when the Pilgrims first arrived they, too, practiced a form of collectivism as dictated by their sponsors back in London where everything went into a common pool and each person got a share of the pool.  The result? As one of their leaders, William Bradford, observed:

“The experience that was had in this common course and condition, tried sundry years … that by taking away property, and bringing community into common wealth, would make them happy and flourishing – as if they were wiser than God,” Bradford wrote. “For this community (so far as it was) was found to breed much confusion and discontent, and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort. For young men that were most able and fit for labor and service did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense … that was thought injustice.”


It wasn't until Bradford assigned each family a plot of land where they could work and reap the benefits of their labor therein that they began to flourish.“This had very good success,” wrote Bradford, “for it made all hands industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been.”


So some of our nation's earliest lessons were about the failures of collectivism, the need to provide incentives for achievement, the folly of equally rewarding the hardworking and the slothful, and the benefit of following the Biblical instruction that "he who will not work will not eat" because, if someone is able to work, the desire to eat is definitely an incentive. It seems that we learned those lessons for the most part for a while and, in the process, enjoyed the benefits of the most prosperous nation on earth. Now, we've abandoned those lessons, replacing true prosperity with a sham economy built on debt, digital wealth unrelated to real production, a dependency class that receives something for nothing and yet is filled with angry resentment, and a frustrated, disappearing middle class that has no incentive for achievement because the government takes away what little they can earn to divide the spoils among either the dependency class or the well-connected, parasitical class that sucks off the taxpayer's teat in Washington DC.


I wish I could believe that we will learn those original lessons again, but I fear that we are too far gone.


1 comment:

  1. Wow, deep stuff. I have to say that I agree with a lot of your thoughts regarding the Occupy movement(its actually a misnomer: should be the Squatter movement). Its hard to understand cold, calculated, unrelenting greed and equally hard to relate to the anti-corporation protesters using Androids and iPads all day long in a public park. It seems to me that the 99% are instead taking kids to school, going to work, and paying their bills the best way they can....

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