Hell, & How We Got Here, Part 3
I found this meme on Facebook the other day and I thought it a necessary retort to traditionalist (“trad”) groups I follow and admire, but refuse to see those elements in our venerated past that brought us to this.
The people I knew as I came up through the 1960s, ’70s, and ‘80s (especially post-college in the Reagan years) who talked the biggest game about “work ethic” and “bootstraps” etc., had always demeaned the work itself. I’d hear expressions like “you gonna end up flippin’ burgers” and—most frequently in South Carolina, where this was more of a thing—“you wanna be diggin’ ditches the rest of your life?” delivered in the most scornful tones and think, well, what if everyone decided those jobs were beneath them?
The irony is Satanically sublime when you realize the social punishment/“incentive” of people looking down on you for being a “common” laborer is what drove such pious neo-Puritan lectures in the first place. That these same people would say all work is noble in the very next breath merely compounded the insult to the spirit.
I like eating in restaurants, too, so I hate how everything is short-staffed. I also like living in a functional society where deliveries are on time and the trash is picked up, so there are levels of concern we've yet to descend to here. Years of telling people some jobs were beneath Smart & Good People has brought us to this.
The mask mandates, frequent up-your-nose testing, the eerie ease of being able to get unemployment benefits, etc., all came together to the tipping point. We were coming it one way or another. Now here we are, well past tipped. Even as these mandates begin to fall away things will never the same.
Welcome to the New Normal, brought to you by Old Normal.
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