theAmishGirl said:
DO NOT take for granted those things for which you have had the opportunity to work and NEVER belittle those who may well have a greater trouble than you have ever dreamed! I also find it quiet remarkable that most of the time these very people have managed to stay out of the lake of self pity and/or pride at which you have so obviously set up camp!
jtbdad said:
I have read my posts over again to be sure and I see nothing that indicates that I feel sorry for myself or that I deserved anything more than what I had or have.
I'm afraid I may have helped stir this conversation up and for that I appologize. I would like to point out one thing, though. Note that she speaks of self pity and/or pride, and of others who have made it through rough times who still seem to share her values and mine concerning pay for what some choose to define as somehow menial work, or work that simply does not deserve higher pay.
It is the combination of having a hard luck story and then describing how hard luck has been overcome that leads to the perception --
perception I want to emphasize, because if I have accused you jtbdad it was wrong of me, and I appologize -- that one has combined self pity with pride
when it is used as a reason for keeping wages low by such a person. Many people struggle, and because of their struggles they develop the exact opposite mentality, especially when faced with the dramatic excesses of much of the upper class in modern times. Never has the difference in lifestyles between the rich and the poor been so dramatic, and if you look worldwide you will see some still living in primitive conditions within miles of people who are living with every modern convenience available to them.
Even in the USA, where there is a lot of opportunity and where, last I checked, there is also the most movement of people up and down the economic ladder of any nation, there is still significant stagnation of the underclass and a widening gap between the lifestyles of the wealthy and the poor. You can argue that anyone can do it if they try, but the fact remains that many people try and fail for example to complete college, and it seems fairly presumptuous to just assume that every last one of them just didn't try hard enough. It is my perception, again, I want to emphasize that word perception, that many people who make it through hard times tend to overlook or downplay the good things. I have not seen you mention what you had that helped you along, for example. Only the bad things.
So to sum up, it really just never comes across well to some of us when people basically argue that someone's honest work is just not worthy of a living wage. If nothing else, in an ideal world people who were not terribly smart would end up being the ones with jobs that require little intelligence to do, and yet they would still deserve a living wage. Someone being unintelligent is not an excuse to relegate them to a low wage job. There is also the complication that the only reason some jobs pay as high as they do is because laws for incorporation, organization, liability control and so forth set a certain class of people in control of things that otherwise would be open options for everyone. For example, one can not simply go out and start hunting for ones own food. One can not just squat down somewhere and farm land that happens to be fallow. There is no particular reason why a person OUGHT to be able to do these things, but at the same time, seeing as our present society is organized such that they can't, there needs to be some attention paid to the fact that that is a freedom that the poor have sacrificed and that they, too, deserve to benefit from the social compact that holds our civilization together every bit as much as those who sit at the controls of the large and powerful organizations made possible by all that regulation.
In short, the same mechanisms that make it possible at all for some to have control and ownership and income and power at the level of the weathier classes today are the ones that hold the working classes down and prevent them from having security in their own lives and wages, so in order to compensate for that, there needs to be a consideration in return for their continued peaceful and law abiding cooperation and productive work as well. This fundamentally precludes the argument, "well, some people's work just is not worth that much money." This is at its foundation a statement of opinion, and the larger the number of people one attempts to lump into this group of people who do not deserve much pay, the less workable society becomes.
That's my view anyhow, and the reason I am not a very Republican Republican.
- so we can put that worry to rest.
