Posted on 02/06/2012 9:23:31 PM PST by Nachum
Newt Gingrich’s notion about “kid janitors” has been widely ridiculed my the media, but I’ve long defended his motives (which some have wrongly called racist), as well as the general premise of his argument. Sadly, this premise — that poor kids might benefit from having positive role models and gaining work experience — was largely overshadowed by the silly “kid janitor” imagery. Newt’s main point, however, deserves consideration. As Gingrich said, “Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works. So literally, they have no habit of showing up
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For Calvin
Over the years I heard some amazingly lame excuses why someone wasn’t coming to work. The importance of dependability is a foreign concept to many people.
“I didn’t see anybody going to work every day”
Still applicable today. I’ve seen more people pay with EBT cards and hang out at the unemployment office more than actually looking for a job.
I saw a guy pay for a diamond ring with an EBT card. Figure that.
Over twelve years in my current job, I’ve taken 2 sick days and went home early a couple of other times. It astonishes me to hear the bull sh*t reasons people give for not showing up when they’re supposed to.
It was way cool to be one of the few selected to work in the kitchen lunchroom behind the counter, serving food portions or washing trays and dishes.
It meant you could be trusted to work around the special industrial equipment, as opposed to merely wiping tables, and emptying trash cans.
And it sure beat washing the chalkboards or beating erasers for the next day, since you had an admiring audience, even if you had to wear the ugly hair nets.
Everyone took their turn with the orange safety belts, loading and unloading the younger children on and off the school busses.
But only a select few had the double belts, and were real designated safety monitors!
We had segregated schools back then, but the black kids did the same things at their schools that the white kids did.
We just lived in different parts of town.
As kids, we didn't know one part was better or worse than the other, since we were all mostly poor.
The “lower classes “ in Britain have the same problem. Back in the early ‘70s I once had a long conversation with a Scot on a boat going from Ireland to Scotland. He was in his fifties and said he feared he would never again be able to get a job, that the country had seen better days. I remember bursting out with something like I couldn’t accept that because there were too many good people in the country. It was not until Margaret Thatcher that the country burst out of the doldrums caused by socialism and Tory me-too-ism. God knows we need someone who dares to break with what has happened since 9/11.
Reminds me of a great Thatcher line from the movie ‘Iron Lady’ “Feelings? Don’t ask me how I’m feeling. Ask me what I’m thinking. Thoughts lead to actions, actions lead to habits, habits lead to your destiny”
The moment that the whine that certain jobs are "demeaning" was legitimized, the floodgates opened to create a whole new group of useless pets.
The ones bearing the cost in money and criminal activity had no voice in the matter.
"Take a job or starve" is the only path to a return of sanity.
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