Once Jobs Come Back

"Once Jobs Come Back, Let’s Hope Our Civility and Goodwill Return As Well" by v. johns, 3/10/10, 11:10 PM

I almost feel guilty ranting and raving about seemingly trivial issues regarding my job life when there are so many people out of work and out of luck in staying in their homes, but the truth is, once this national governmental and financial mess has finally been cleaned up, the temptation of our people to return to the same stupid habits that got us into this mess shall remain. I don’t give a crap what CNN and MSNBC say, it’s just not enough that government and the banks clean up their act, while the rest of us continue treating each other like garbage for no apparent reason other than to be cute or spread hate.

Our American culture has become rife with the types of personal nastiness and stupidity that makes serious ongoing problems like racism and sexism look like minor inconvenience in comparison. Have you ever been hated for wearing glasses or for looking studious? I have. I can count the number of times on two hands, in my entire lifetime, that I’ve actually been called the “er”-ending variation of N-word. Compare that to the thousands of times I’ve been called “nerd” or “square” or “fag” or the “a”-ending variation of the N-word out of pure personal hate and human disregard on the part of the idiots hurling those putrid insults that the losers in life often do. It just makes me wonder, with all these people with so much time on their hands to find ways other than race, religion and gender to separate ourselves and spread hate in multiple forms, where do people have the time to engage in the only nation building that counts… our own? Where’s that strong, sturdy blue-collar intellectual set from the 1980s that read the paper, watched the news, voted, sent all their kids off to college and watched their neighbors yards?

We all need jobs. No doubt about that. But if you think for one minute that economic prosperity is all there is to American prosperity, you, my friend, are a fool. Our economic prosperity begins with our moral clarity. And our moral clarity begins with us. We shouldn’t allow our fellow Americans to hate other Americans over the stupidest of things just because its the cool thing to do or the cute thing to do or because we want to feel like we’re living out, in real life, an episode of Desperate Housewives or Jersey Shore.

Once the jobs come back a new attitude must also emerge. I heard it said that, one time that in America, we are no longer our brother’s keeper. And I believe that the fact that we no longer really look after one another, unless we HAVE TO, has played right into the hands of the bozos that are at the heart of all this misery. Let’s all make sure these politicians and bankers do their jobs, but even more important than that, let’s all make sure we do our job in actually participating in our own democracy and taking care of each other through both government and private means. It’s okay to be cute. It’s okay to follow and be obsessed with celebrities. It’s even okay to notice differences amongst ourselves and revel in them. It’s not okay to allow our country and our society to fragment in so many different directions that we fail to see that how prosperous we have become, throughout history, is the direct result of our ability to supersede our fragile human tendencies for the greater good so that all who call America home will feel welcome here…