Month: January 2022

They’re calling it the Great Resignation.  Millions of Americans simply have been quitting their jobs, whether professions/degree-required or blue-collar labor.  Just in November 2021, four million workers flat out quit.  Anyone else humming that ol’ country song Take This Job & Shove It?  Come on, might as well be honest.  Aren’t we just a little bit proud of those folks?  Quitting a job is one of the most uplifting, life-affirming, positive steps we can take … sometimes.

Why the mass exodus?  Where’s the fire?  Reasons include: the unexpected pandemic when our government agreed to financially compensate practically everybody for mandatory business shut downs; mothers who have no choice but to stay home with their youngest children not yet vaccinated or in school or their elementary schools and daycare facilities closed; personal or family illness (cancer and other devastating long-term health crises); work too high stress with little income (minimum wage); moving in with parents or family to go to college and change careers; and, it is believed for the vast majority, an overwhelming realization that ‘Life is short’ and ‘Quality of life matters.’  I mean, what exactly are we working for anyway?  The Man?  A comfortable retirement that likely will never happen for most of us?  Not anymore, say America’s purposefully unemployed.

Scranton’s everywhere

Although there are many reasons for the Great Resignation, one type of 20^th century employment has taken a beating: The Office.  Ironic since many binged on that very show while quarantined for months at home.  But for all of us who have worked in office buildings, we understand the feeling.  Working in an office is not unlike a prison sentence.  We bide our time, do our work, and if unhappy seek a way out, another job.

Until then, office workers arrive faithfully Monday through Friday, most driving in traffic that extends the journey an hour or so longer than it should be both morning and night.  We owe, we owe, so off to work we go.  We arise in the dark morning, yawn repeatedly as we prepare for work.  Many office workers must dress well, too.  We answer to a boss or to several in upper management for they hold our livelihoods in their hands.

Office workers see themselves as cogs in a wheel.  Their work has some sort of purpose, and they are given deadlines and know the importance of what they do for a living.  The most industrious often eat lunch at their desks or in their cubicles, maybe take a brief walk in sunny weather.  There are office parties for birthdays and Christmas and occasionally a co-worker’s new baby.  There is the funeral sympathy bouquet from the office.  Sometimes co-workers go out for lunch.  If they’re really lucky, some people who meet at work build good friendships, see a movie together or catch a concert, occasionally or even weekly go for a drink, once or twice a year get the families together for a swim or dinner at each other’s homes.  As if mystically pre-ordained, there are couples who meet at work, date and marry and start a family.

That’s the dream, the way office workers hope time under the long flat fluorescent ceiling will turn out.  Maybe the work is bearable and rewarding and some well-liked folks stay to retirement.  Retirement parties are fun, leaving a sprinkle of optimism about the future.  But the Great Resignation, caused by colliding yet related situations, boils down to unhappiness.

Time alone, with children and the extra government money, may have driven some workers to think about whether or not their job’s really been worth it: the hassle, the traffic, the gas, the vehicle, the hours away from family, sitters, parental guilt, uncomfortable clothes and shoes.  Millions upon millions of Americans who were inadvertently left alone for a good year say NO.

Then there’s the other aspect of work whether in an office or elsewhere: the assorted personalities.  That’s the fun part when watching a TV show, seeing all the characters and what they’re up to when no one else is around.  But when people of various ages and backgrounds are thrown together, especially for jobs and income that everyone must have to survive, it’s not so interesting.  In fact, it rarely works out.

Been there, done that

I’ve worked many office jobs, at least four at newspapers.  I’ve worked other office secretarial gigs, too.  Maybe work contentment amounts to the job, the salary and the boss, but co-workers go a long way in determining happiness.  That quality is not so elusive.  Looking back at all the jobs I’ve had, I only had three great bosses.  Let’s start there.  What made those bosses so great was: TRUST.  They were competent, mature, and made good hires.  They hired me, didn’t they?  They sat back and managed.  Nothing to it really if you hire good people.

I guess we’ve all had crazy bosses.  One boss was so critical of me on a weekly basis … that I just quit.  I would never advise anyone to quit a job without having another one.  For months I felt so foolish.  Why didn’t I just put up with the situation until I was fired and at least have some income instead of zero?  Life sometimes gives you an answer.  I ran into a former co-worker who told me he’d quit after I did and several others followed my lead!  To them, prisoners their work, my resignation was heroic.  My instincts were right, but I remained unemployed, depressed, and miserable for a long time.

Back to my earlier premise about work sometimes being like a prison sentence, quitting a really bad job and impossible situation with an awful boss is like setting yourself free.  Believe me, the giddy exhilaration of sticking up for yourself, ‘letting go and letting God,’ completely trusting in a Higher Good, a just force in the universe that will take care of you and support your decision to quit a job is … short lived.  Turns out, I was the only one who believed in myself.  Self-assurance doesn’t pay the bills.  Lesson learned: Best to grin and bear an awful job till a better one comes along.  I wonder if any of the tens of millions who’ve quit their jobs reached epiphany yet.

How are teachers supposed to even teach now in Texas? The state Legislature and Governor have gone off the deep end trying to close the mouths of public school teachers. What’s got them riled this time is a concept about which they know nothing: critical race theory.  The problem with the theory is that white people think they know all about it, and what they think they know greatly offends them down to their lily-white foundation. So the white-dominated Texas Legislature and Governor are telling teachers to ‘Watch it!’ when dealing with our country’s and state’s history as well as current events involving racial conflict (and oppression). Seriously, they want teachers to self-censor their attitudes, word choice, sentence structure and personal emotions as to not leave any Texas school student thinking less of his or her or another’s race (especially the great white race) when delving into our collective history and government. LOL!!

This is as asinine as it is offensive to any intelligent person living today.

What’s been a-happening in the past couple of years, perhaps more so during the time students spent studying at home and more and more relying on the internet for research, is kids have been asking a lot of questions about America’s history and race relations.  A 21^st century student is different from one learning in the 20^th century. A kid today doesn’t just read history books and gloss over common phrases we all learned, like: “slave-holding states,” “three-fifths of a free person,” “set all his slaves free upon his death,” “Trail of Tears,” “The Civil Rights Amendment of 1964,” “The Voting Rights Act of 1965,” “women’s suffrage,” “Japanese internment camps,” “National Guard shot college students protesting the Vietnam War,” “French Fries changed to Freedom Fries,” “America’s longest war.”

A kid in school today, from elementary to high school, will immediately research online any new term or time period. They do it on their classroom laptops.  And alongside all the misinformation that is online is also all the truth: authentic pictures of an African American hanging from a tree, and another picture, and another one, and another one … thousands from the 19th to the 20th centuries (the names now preserved on hanging headstones in a museum); the Pulitzer Prize winning photo of the young teen crying over a slain college student at an anti-Vietnam War protest; all the Civil War photos; all the WWI and WWII photos; all the Nazi concentration camp photos; and all the validated and substantiated research confirming our history–all the same stuff we learned way back when, well, suitable for printing in a school textbook.

But kids today ask questions in the classroom while studying American history and other subjects, questions that we never asked before the internet: “OK, um, exactly why were Africans brought here as slaves? Why not people from other parts of the world?” “What I don’t understand is why didn’t the slaves just proclaim their freedom, say ‘I’m not a slave’ and just leave the plantations.”

Ah, the rub, my fellow white Americans, Southerners and Texans. We don’t want to acknowledge the ugly truth, the reason ‘why’ which young students want and deserve to know. We’d have to tell the kids, er students: “Slavery was a brutal system. ”

What do you mean? What would happen if they ran away and just started working for themselves, start their own communities?

“If a slave were caught, he or she would be punished. Some were hobbled so they’d never run or walk normally or quickly again.”

But why? Why were the people who owned slaves so cruel? Why couldn’t they just let the slaves work like all the European indentured servants who came here, like seven years or so, and then let them be free?

“White European people of the time in the U.S., the 17^th, 18^th and 19^th centuries, maintained a deep conviction that their way of life was the only proper way to live. For many centuries Western European man believed his religion, race, culture, art, music, literature and even the English language were superior to all other people around the world.”

This kind of objective classroom conversation, one whereby the educator takes great care to explain to young minds so that they understand the past, is now hereby banned from taking place in Texas schools.

The flow of teaching and learning

Texas lawmakers don’t understand the flow of a lesson, the classroom and teaching. A teacher organizes lessons by specific concepts and units to eventually cover a school year’s course like history or literature, music or science, for example. (FYI: Every school subject’s concepts were set in stone by the Texas Legislature in the 1980s.) Throughout the lesson, however, questions and conversations from students can (and should) pop up. A modern teacher would allow conversation and not stifle it. Teachers today do not expect, and school administrators do not want to see, students sitting in their desks erect and quiet. The 21^st century classroom is supposed to be lively and engaging and allows for conversation and curiosity—because students who ask questions are learning.

By the way, all those blunt questions being asked about America’s documented past and current conflicts centered on race are not from African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans or Hispanics. The questions are coming from the white kids. Unlike most of us at their age—we who accepted as fact what we learned in school, like ‘Africans were brought here to be sold as slaves,’ ‘the Civil War was fought over many issues of which only one was slavery,’ the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, ‘public schools had to be integrated because they were segregated for a hundred years’—students today don’t just accept what they’re taught, no questions asked. People who are not white know their history. We don’t.

And the Texas Legislature wants to keep it that way.