SUMMATION: WHEN MEN WON’T WORK AND THE WOMEN THAT CARRY THEM!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© April 1, 2011
REFERENCE:
Since I created this website and blog several years ago, I have had sporadic responses to more than 630 missives, but never the volume that this missive has generated. It is as if I have let the genie out of the bag.
Women, who have embraced continuing change, and have hunkered down and made the most of their situation, have said, “I hear you.”
Some have suggested I write a book on the subject. Alas, I don’t have the energy or the will. Others have asked what they should do about the situation, and I have made some comment about that.
For every hundred responses only one has been from a man. Surprisingly, men don't challenge my premise, or appear bitter, but lost. I will address that here.
I know this is April first, but this is not an “April Fools” missive. These are difficult times for everyone.
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A READER WRITES:
Jim,
Thank you for your missive. I don't think all women are the enablers for the men who don't work. Some men like many women I know are just plain lazy.
I guess I should never write things at 2 A.M. in the morning when I can't sleep, but felt I needed to add my 2 cents worth at that time in the morning I guess. I do enjoy your missives but have to look up many words you use sometimes. Reading you is a continuing learning experience for me. Hope you are well also.
Carol S
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DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Dear Carol S:
A fine two cents it is.
My inclination is to go for the jugular, that is, I explore the weakness and don’t always indicate the landscape in which that weakness occurs. I hope to rectify that here.
Yes, there are lazy men and lazy women in our society, but they are a very small segment of our society. Work is the essence of life for most Americans. We take pride in some kind of work.
Should we run into someone new, we ask immediately what he or she does. It is how we identify ourselves as persons. We don’t say, as they do in the East, where we matriculated, but how we spend our time daily in the course of our lives. We don’t become billboards for institutions such as Northwestern or Harvard or Yale or Princeton or Stanford.
The late Joe Moldt was a classmate of mine at St. Patrick’s grade school, but went to different high school. He was at my high school's fiftieth class reunion, and someone asked him where he worked. “I work at Mercy hospital,” Joe said. Then the classmate, asked, “Are you a doctor?” Without hesitation, Joe said, “I work in maintenance.”
That is identity. That is integrity. That reflects a man with a center proud of what he does and who he is.
* * *
America won World War Two with men of Joe’s ilk. America built itself into the lone superpower of the world over the last sixty-five years on men of Joe’s ilk.
Over that sixty-five year period, the world was changing. Thanks to the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine Europe got its feet under it, and rose to self-sustaining determinism. The same can be said for Japan, South Korea, Israel and such countries as Iran, Egypt, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. America did the same in South East Asia for such countries as Singapore.
America built the post-World War Two world into a fine competitor.
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America has always been strongest and most purposeful when it had a recognized enemy such as Germany and Japan in World War Two, and the Soviet Union in post-World War Two.
In 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down, and East and West Germany unified, America fed aid and technology into the renewed Republic of Germany, as it did to Japan and South Korea and other redeveloping countries after that war.
Something happened to America, though, when the Berlin Wall went down. It was as if America no longer had to operate on all its cylinders, and could retreat back to the safety of its two giant ocean isolation with weak neighbors to the North and South, and coast for the foreseeable future.
I saw this first hand as an American sailor on the flagship of the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean, as a consultant working across the United States, and in North and South America, and as a corporate executive living in South Africa and Europe. America was resting on its laurels getting fat and sassy for the attention.
America had unwittingly established a corrupt system, which I have labeled “corpocracy,’ the latest iteration being the real estate meltdown of 2008 and the Wall Street meltdown of 2009.
When I came back from Europe in 1990, I wrote a book describing precisely what I saw and what I thought it meant. I also bought a house in Tampa, Florida for $108,000, a modest house of 3,500 square feet with three full bathrooms and four bedrooms in a nice neighborhood, but far from the palatial neighborhoods that some of my colleagues chose to live.
In 2008, my house was valued as $375,000; today it is valued at $275,000, both far above the purchased price. I am not now or have I ever been interested in selling. We have lived in this house twenty-three years and counting.
A neighbor of mine bought essentially the same house on another block but without my study for over $400,000 in 2006. Were that neighbor to sell today, it would fall into the category of a reverse mortgage, owing more than the seller could get for it. This situation is likely to continue for at least the next few years.
I mention this for two reasons:
(1) I’ve never forgotten my roots nor been interested in keeping up with the Joneses;
(2) I have been labeled a pessimist by some for the body of my work, which include WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990), THE WORKER, ALONE! (1995), SIX SILENT KILLERS (1998), CORPORATE SIN (2000) and A LOOK BACKWARD TO SEE AHEAD (2007), along with a few hundred missives on the subject (www.fisherofideas.com). That said anyone could see what was happening that had similar experiences to my own. I chose to write about it.
Other authors, such as William L. Livingston IV have written perceptively on the subject, but to no avail. Optimism is endemic to our culture. Consequently, books that get published by major publishers and read by concerned readers have a tendency to dance on around the mulberry bush as intellectual stimulation, entertainments or provocations of one interest group at the expense of another.
In a planned missive, I call this being aboard THE SHIP OF FOOLS.
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If you are still with me, what I’m trying to point out is that the American who identifies with what he or she does has not died. That American has been made surplus by atavistic management and anachronistic leadership in institutions across American society from industry, religion, and education to government and economic practices.
MEN WHO WON’T WORK have watched their normal livelihoods dry up or be exported to other countries.
MEN WHO WON’T WORK never saw education as their first job, and so failed to identify education as necessary work. Moreover, they failed to find passion in a curriculum that appealed to twenty percent of the students but which they saw themselves forced to take.
Drop out rates have never been fully appreciated in this context.
One of the great tragedies of a non-thinking society was the idea that everyone needed a college education. That idea left eighty percent of our unemployed, many with college degrees or some college, essentially on the dole, or so discouraged that they no longer look for work.
MEN WHO WON’T WORK are not bad people. They are depressed people, people who have been marginalized because they have no faith in the system, find no reason to hope, and no place to put their love of doing.
MEN WHO WON'T WORK see work has been taken from them, and they have done nothing wrong. These are the assembly workers, tool and die makers, steel workers, carpenters, bricklayers, plumbers, pipe fitters, electricians, and appliance repairers, on and on and on.
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A century ago, eighty percent of Americans work on farms or worked in industries in support of farming; today only two percent of Americans are involved in such work. The science of agriculture along with industrialization and war accelerated change. Even this magnificent development has a short life.
Look at our institutions, and where the power lies in governance from the smallest community to the largest state house to the federal government, and you will see the strong hand of the farmer still in vogue. Put another way, anachronism has come into play, as high-end manufacturing didn’t go to the low paying developing nations across the globe but to Germany. Where was Detroit when this was happening?
The one stigma, and I call it that from the century ago dominance of American farming has been parochialism. We have never been comfortable as a superpower and never wise in protecting our self-interests when it came to industry and the employment of our people. Consider this against the fact that the American Civil War was the greatest spark to industrialization the world had ever known. Where has all that energy gone?
MEN WHO WON’T WORK have been left in the lurch. We take pride in being the schoolhouse of the world with our great universities. But while our heads are in the clouds about this, we have not made it easy for ordinary Americans to find their way to a decent living, decent lifestyle and decent return on their investment. Shame on you, America!
I say this with great sadness.
Be always well,
Jim
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