Our culture, or what's left of it.
Apr. 8th, 2013 01:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsNormally, I consider myself something of an odd centrist, with a decidely liberal bent in some places, but there are days when I read something that makes me think that the Left needs a deep and painful wedgie. Yesterday on Twitter I saw a comment, to which I shall not link, which to me perfectly encapsulated why I feel that way.
UK deputy leader of the Labour Party, Harriet Harman, was opining about why the disastrous "workfare"-like program in the UK was necessary, saying "The small minority who don't want to work they are let off the hook by the fact there isn't a proper work programme."
To which someone on my twitter feed said, "I've never fucking met anyone who wanted to work." To which my inner Theodore Dalrymple said, "There's our culture, or what's left of it, right in a nutshell."
Because I want to work. I don't want to sit on my arse all day and do nothing; I want to contribute, I want to be part of a community, I want my efforts to be valued and valuable. I want the self-respect that comes from doing something that keeps the machinery of civilization turning. I want to believe that I'm actively making these the early days of a better nation. Watching television isn't that. Nor is penning bad punk rock odes. Nor is urinating on sidewalks, puking outside pubs, or whinging about the system without actually doing something about it.
This disease of learned helplessness and immature entitlement is the real rot at the core of our civilization.
As a culture, I want to be able to support those who cannot support themselves. Even those, I want to want to be able to. I want a culture that values work. I don't know where the UK went wrong in this regard, but it surely seems to have done, and I hope that the US doesn't follow it the UK down the same pathetic path.
UK deputy leader of the Labour Party, Harriet Harman, was opining about why the disastrous "workfare"-like program in the UK was necessary, saying "The small minority who don't want to work they are let off the hook by the fact there isn't a proper work programme."
To which someone on my twitter feed said, "I've never fucking met anyone who wanted to work." To which my inner Theodore Dalrymple said, "There's our culture, or what's left of it, right in a nutshell."
Because I want to work. I don't want to sit on my arse all day and do nothing; I want to contribute, I want to be part of a community, I want my efforts to be valued and valuable. I want the self-respect that comes from doing something that keeps the machinery of civilization turning. I want to believe that I'm actively making these the early days of a better nation. Watching television isn't that. Nor is penning bad punk rock odes. Nor is urinating on sidewalks, puking outside pubs, or whinging about the system without actually doing something about it.
This disease of learned helplessness and immature entitlement is the real rot at the core of our civilization.
As a culture, I want to be able to support those who cannot support themselves. Even those, I want to want to be able to. I want a culture that values work. I don't know where the UK went wrong in this regard, but it surely seems to have done, and I hope that the US doesn't follow it the UK down the same pathetic path.
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The difference between services & service
Date: 2013-04-09 02:07 am (UTC)I wonder if the work-refusers and work-avoiders aren't the descendants of lifelong servants, for whom a life of service was actually a step up from poverty & the fields.
For people in those circumstances/that class, it would make sense that work could not seem worthwhile, nor anything but soul-grinding and urgently in need of avoidance.
Especially if schools were a process of training such people for such jobs.
It seems to me that a lot of people even in the U.S. see such jobs as the only kind available, but imagine themselves as one day winning a lottery or otherwise getting ahead in life to the point of not having to do that kind of work, so acquiesce to the system based on that hope (a hope that seems absent in older people here, btw.)
I think that there is a large class of UKers who don't even think they have hope of anything better when they're young, and give up before starting the game. I'm afraid that what the USers in that position do is join the military.