THE LAUGHING BLUE COLLAR WORKER: A
DREAM QUEST FOR AMERICA
Written Tues. Dec. 4th, 2018;
posted Sat. Dec. 8th, 2018
The Laughing Cavalier, a painting painted
by Frans Hals in the 1620's, looks like this (if it works right on my blog):
Cavalier (from the Italian word for "knight")
basically means a gentleman, or perhaps an army officer.
My vision here is not that blue collar workers are somehow
the knights of America. That is too
romantic for me, or perhaps too obscure.
The vision is simply of American blue collar workers who are confident
in the American economy. That's a
throwback vision or dream.
The term "dream quest" is used by anthropologists
to describe a traditional Native American custom, of a youth who goes searching
for a vision on reaching the age of puberty.
The Native American custom is
based, as it seems to me, on a simple but reasonable premise:
If you want to have a dream, you need to ask for one.
That is -- you need to ask your
God, or my God, or higher powers, or whatever spirit is considered most awesome
and powerful in your world, even if it means calling upon the average wisdom of
the average person (the original and etymological meaning of "common
sense").
If we ask, stubbornly and
repeatedly, for a vision of a confident blue collar worker, that will provide
our best chance at obtaining such a vision.
I mentioned the word throwback,
and you may be thinking, despite my remarks, that I am being too romantic. But one of the things that modern people
fairly consistently fail to take into account, is that the idea of change
includes the idea of changing back.
"Them days is gone forever" is true about some things -- especially,
at a certain point, the youthfulness of any given generation -- but it is not
true about all things. To grab an easy
example, farming has made hunting less central to the human way of life; but nothing so far (in the last ten
thousand years, that is) has made hunting disappear.
To narrow the picture down some,
the vision is of and for someone who says, "I don't particularly want to
become more educated than my parents were.
I would like to be able to get a job that will put food on the table for
an average-sized modern family, after schooling which lasts no longer than a
human childhood and adolescence, with some free years at the beginning of my
childhood to play, the way children in other countries and in my country
traditionally have done. And I need my
job to be an activity which does not destroy the environment for my children
and my children's children."
The vision is of gainful
employment and a living wage for people who don't want to become highly
educated, such as was open to our ancestors.
When we consider this vision, we
need to recall that the authors of the Declaration of Independence did not
first conduct a study to determine if life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness was a workable and attainable goal.
Instead, they first articulated their vision and declared it as their
goal, and then they fought for it.
I'm not asking for a rebellion,
because the success of the American Revolution was a freak accident. Most rebellions end like the rebellion in
Spain, with all the rebels being killed.
But I am asking for a re-visioning..
Blue collar work involves growing
things and making things. The question
is not whether we can re-involve human beings in these activities with wages
adequate to support a family. The
questions is how.
People who have studied our
nation's youth report that they need to become more resilient. That means our youth need to become better at
problem-solving, and more able to bounce back after setbacks -- more able to
recalibrate and re-channel and re-try their dreams, instead of setting fire to
what they have already attempted and giving up on the idea of having any dreams
or visions whatsoever.
In a nutshell, resilience is a
fancy word for toughness. What observers
of our nation's youth are calling for is a national or international
re-toughening -- a re-toughening without loss of mental fitness.
In the past couple of paragraphs,
I have used several words with the prefix re-.
This basically implies that we need, as a nation or as a species, to go
back and do some things again which we have already done, or do some things
which our ancestors used to do, perhaps including some things that we thought
we would never have to do again (like twisting off the heads of chickens). Also,
this re-toughening includes a re-toughening of our system of education.
I will try to add one last picture --
Norman Rockwell's painting Free Speech in his Four Freedoms series of
paintings:
It's not a picture of me.
I'm an intellectual. But it's a
picture of someone that I want to be on the same team with, in terms of us
having the same vision for our country and for the human beings in our world.
It's almost like looking at the jungle construction workers
in India and Southeast Asia and saying, "Putting those elephants to work
is not a bad idea, as long as we don't forget to ask 'What would Jesus do?'
from time to time." And then be
honest about the answer, and try to do something to make what Jesus would do
happen.
Rockwell's painting is an extremely simple but effective
picture of a blue collar worker standing up and speaking in a gathering of
mostly white collar workers, who are paying attention to what he has to
say. This is a romantic painting, but it
is not more romantic than the Declaration of Independence. The website of the Norman Rockwell Museum
(currently
https://www.nrm.org/2012/01/norman-rockwells-four-freedoms/)
says about the inspiration for the painting:
" .
. . Rockwell wanted to do more for the war effort and decided he would
illustrate Roosevelt’s four freedoms. Finding new ideas for paintings never
came easily, but this was a greater challenge. . . . While
mulling it over, Rockwell, by chance, attended a town meeting where one man
rose among his neighbors and voiced an unpopular view. That night Rockwell
awoke with the realization that he could paint the freedoms best from the
perspective of his own hometown experiences using everyday, simple scenes such
as his own town meeting."
Another website I looked at a
while back (I have lost the reference) stated that the man Rockwell saw standing up and speaking at a
town meeting did not persuade the other people at the meeting, but was listened
to with respect. That may be, but it's
still a useful painting.
In a poem, William Blake said
"I will not cease from Mental Fight."
The American Revolution effectively began with the mental work of
writing the Declaration of Independence.
All successful fighting begins in the mind. We have pictured the first step in what is
needed to revive the fortunes of blue collar work as a vision quest.
Closing
Three factors remain to be
raised. Firstly, the Declaration of
Independence ends with the signers' pledge, "we mutually pledge to each
other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor." The reference to our Fortunes was not empty. The signers were wealthy in their day. That
is not to say that there were no wealthy people among the Loyalists. But the vision we envision cannot succeed,
unless a fair share of the rich
people of today sign onto it.
Secondly, the signers were
unhampered by a dreadful encumbrance which drags upon us: the encumbrance of
addiction to illegal drugs. In our
country today, this addiction is endemic to all social classes: to the rich, to the middle class, and
to the poor; and each of these three
classes blames the curse of this addiction upon the bad example of the other
two. Today, addiction to illegal drugs
is a major source of strife between the social classes. If the vision is to succeed, a sufficient
number of people of every social class must renounce this addiction.
It is not impossible. The founders of our country were faced with
demons of their own. In the case of the
demon of slavery, they managed to postpone the reckoning until a lifetime after
their struggle was won -- an extremely powerful strategic move. The contribution of Virginia leaders to
American independence is well known.
Thirdly and lastly, the vision
depends for success on an accommodation of feelings with a fourth class not yet
mentioned, though routinely included among the poor, namely, the class of
people who have no job at all, no prospects of one, and sometimes no desire for
one. What seems necessary to me is an
accommodation based upon Jesus' approach to the poor in Matthew 25:37-40:
37 Then the righteous will answer Him saying,
Lord, when did we see you hungry, and feed [you]? Or thirsty, and give [you] drink? 38
When did we see you a stranger, and give [you] shelter? Or without clothing, and clothed [you]? 39 Or
when did we see you sick, or in prison, and visit you? 40 And
the King will answer and say to them, In truth I tell you, Inasmuch as you all
have done to one of the least of these my brothers, you all have done unto me.
Jesus is describing charity. The insight of modern city-dwellers is that
the government can help very efficiently with charity. Welfare is charity; charity is love; love is
what Jesus asks. On this matter of
efficiency, country-dwellers need to trust city-dwellers. The least of these our brothers are not the
working poor -- they are the people on the dole. The issue here is for the working poor not to
be consumed with envy for, or anger with, those on the dole. The working poor are not the proletariat in
the Latin meaning, which means those whose only contribution to the state is
making babies. The people on the dole
are the proletariat in the Latin sense. The
eagle defecates in many different ways.
If you are eager to hold down a job without umpteen extra helpings of education,
then you need to reach peace of mind and charity (an attitude of love and
acceptance) with the fact that some people in your country, as well as in every
other country, do not want to hold down a job, or are unfitted even for the
jobs that require the least amount of education. They may lack your physical strength. Goal-oriented behavior may be beyond their
reach. Jesus' saying The poor you have
always with you, is a saying about those on the dole, and the saying is addressed to the working poor. -- That is the
accommodation needed to make this vision work.
You can call the ideas expressed
in this essay simplistic, but to paraphrase what I've already written, then you
would have to call the Declaration of Independence simplistic.
Frank Newton
