paradise for parasites

It’s 11:30 on a Thursday morning.  I’m sitting at a worn, round table next to the stairs in the Santa Barbara Public Library.  I just came from outside, where I was having an impromptu conversation with Kenny the hobo from Hell’s Kitchen, New York.  You see, while I am employed as a finish carpenter, I am without work.  That’s what affords me this supposed luxury of free time.  What do I do with my increasingly familiar freedom?  I hang out with my friends who, intentionally or not, have made a career out of this.  Kenny’s been living on the street for a long time, fifteen years plus.  He’s a pretty unique character, to which his black Crocodile Dundee hat and creaking Manhattan accent can alone attest.  But he’s got a pretty unique perspective of this American life as well.  Kenny never asks nothing from nobody.  He doesn’t fly a sign, he doesn’t go to the Rescue Mission or the “Starvation” Army.  He collects recycling, cans and bottles mostly.  And by 11 AM he’s got a 50 pound bag going.

Kenny’s perspective comes largely out of an upbringing that taught him three rules: a man’s got to feed himself, clothe himself, and shelter himself.  Everything else is optional.  But he doesn’t see too many people living by such rules in this country, and especially not in Santa Barbara.  Paradise for parasites, he calls it.

Parasites survive by attaching themselves to a host and sucking the life out of it, Kenny explains.  We do it too, from the homeless community to mainstream society.  We, in a legitimate realization of our seemingly hopeless situations, attach ourselves to people and organizations that we hope stay afloat as we drown.  Like the Salvation Army and kind college students offering meals to the poor in the park.  Like friends and family who are better off than us.  Like the government.  All exist in a large part to bail us out.

This is not to say that such generous people and organizations should stop their actions and let people starve.  Not at all.  Everyone needs a hand from time to time.  But not as a way of life, Kenny says.  Unfortunately, charitable systems break down and create parasitic paradises by giving indiscriminately.  It is a sad but seemingly inevitable consequence of generosity.  There will always be leeches.

Such parasites know that they can leech off others and do very little of their own accord to survive, even thrive.  Quickly the parasite becomes conditioned to this way of life, may even forget what it means to be responsible to and for oneself.  Maybe it never learned.  Yet we were not born parasites.  Neither were we born responsible.  Both are learned behaviors.

And responsibility is fundamental to the problem with parasites.  The problem is that as a society and as individuals we have never learned it.  In Shopclass as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work, Matthew Crawford observes the disconnect between individual responsibility and work.  He sees an increasing stultification of “knowledge workers”, (i.e. those who have gone to college and who fulfill the socially idealized jobs that are supposedly based on knowledge and education rather than tangible skills) in workplaces that are more concerned with personal characteristics than with accomplished goals.  In such workplaces people are more focused on maintaining their employment and moving up the social ladder through face-saving ambiguity than in getting real work done.  ”One’s career  depends entirely on these personal relationships [with hierarchical authority], in part because the criteria of evaluation are ambiguous”(Crawford 138).  This given, much of these workers’ jobs consist of “constant interpretation and reinterpretation of events that constructs a reality in which it is difficult to pin blame on anyone, especially oneself”(Calhoun, as qtd. by Crawford 139).  In ambiguous work with ambiguous standards, we dodge responsibility and the possibility of our careers being jeopardized.  For a simpler and more comical example, watch any episode of The Office. It’s funny because it’s true.

Crawford’s argument comes out of a larger argument for the value of the manual trades, jobs often believed to be unworthy of college graduates.  I know this well as I have received plenty of disappointed and surprised looks, even laughs when I tell people I work construction.  (Slightly more interest and less pity is expressed if I say I’m a carpenter, but then all the Jesus jokes come out.)  Crawford points to manual trades as a positive example of responsibility in the workplace because of objective standards that must be met, rather than social BS for the sake of upward mobility.  If I screw something up, everyone knows it because they can see it.  They can check to see if the jamb I just set is plumb and square.  I bear the responsibility, whether I’ve done a good job or bad.  You can’t BS  crown moulding like you can BS an academic essay.  Your career future depends on your performance far more than on personal relationships.

School, unfortunately, trains us to be masters of the refined art of bullshitting.  The dismaying reality is that students become more concerned with the grade than with knowledge, and with real accomplishment.  The grade becomes the accomplishment.  Ideally the grade is an objective symbol of competency.  But anyone who has spent any time in academia knows this routinely breaks down.  There are always avenues for fudging or manipulating, be it the assignments or professors themselves.  I’m not talking about cheating, but of the craft of telling the teacher what she wants hear.  We have all done it.

And our education is our responsibility.  We choose whether or not we learn.  Unfortunately there exist massive external pressures to excel beyond our peers, to get ahead in the competitive market of college or graduate school, which has far less to do with actual knowledge and skill than it does with GPA, honor society memberships, and letters of recommendation.  This is how the system works, and we have to play the game.  We have to jump through these hoops to get to the point we want to be at, which for most is the ideal career.  Graduate from college and you quickly realize that you’ve been deluded for a long time.

Those ideal careers aren’t out here just waiting for grads racing across the finish line, degree in hand.  I graduated from a fine liberal arts institution in May of this past year, and disappointed as the world may be in me, I am a carpenter.  What, do you ask, do my other classmates do with their expensive education?  They work at coffee shops and grocery stores.  They tutor and babysit.  They work multiple part time jobs to pay off the inordinate loans that might haunt them the rest of their lives.  They futilely search for better employment, any employment.  Some even hop from house to house, unable to find work and unable to afford rent.  They’d be on the street if it weren’t for caring friends, friends who have compassion but also eventually resent such parasitic behavior.

Emerging from the rigors of academia, we have discovered that, while grades are important to schools, the rest of the world could care less.  The working world wants experience, work experience, and that is precisely what we don’t have.  A friend of mine recently got her nursing license in Oregon.  She is an extraordinarily bright individual, with incredible ability and a compassionate heart.  She would be an ideal nurse.  But two and a half months and close to 100 applications later, she’s still unemployed.  You need x number of years experience, the rejectors say.

The odd thing is that school is supposed to be training for something.  Apparently it’s not for employment.  Don’t get me wrong; I do not regret my education for a second.  I think it has value apart from career or even practical application.  But I didn’t go to school to get a job.  A lot of others do.  That’s what we’re told to do.  But when we get out of school, we can’t actually do much of anything.  I have been fortunate enough to find a company that wants to train me, despite my complete lack of construction experience.  My situation is a rarity, I am frequently told.

So what does this all mean for responsibility, for ourselves and for others?  The same kind of learned irresponsibility exists in both the workplace and school.  But there’s an awkward chasm between the two, which leaves us at a complete loss.  But the insanity doesn’t end if we manage to bridge the gap, because we are still a society which spends and consumes way beyond its means, without a thought to the systems and people we are sucking dry.  Like parasites.

Kenny the hobo from Hell’s Kitchen takes care of himself.  He doesn’t collect welfare, social security, unemployment, food stamps, anything.  Hauling his behemoth bag of recyclables, he has a pride that will not be broken.  It is a good sort of pride, one that allows him to look in the mirror and know, actually know, that he is taking care of himself.  Maybe we can learn something from a guy like Kenny, who carries his own load.  Maybe we can have a little more pride in ourselves as people capable of influencing the world in which we live.

I’ll leave you with one parting thought, the same thought Kenny left me with.  What is progress?  Is it things getting better?  Or is it things going to their logical conclusion?  What will be our logical conclusion?

Works Cited

Crawford, Matthew B.  Shopclass as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work. New York: The Penguin Press, 2009.

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