Minding My Business by Staying Out of Business

Whether they were edited or taken out of context or whatever, Obama's comments on Friday still manage to  give me even less incentive to start my own business. For those of you out of the know (such as future readers), the full text reads thus:

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business -- you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet. 

 To anyone who has started or thought seriously about starting a business, the first half of that paragraph states the painfully obvious. Of course we all depend on someone else for various and sundry items and services in my life. Without civilized society, I'd be working from sun-up to sunset to gather nuts and berries, hunt varmints, tan hides, haul water, fix the shelter, etc. As I write this, I sit on a comfy chair that I didn't build, typing on a computer I didn't invent and powered by electricity I didn't generate, watching a movie I didn't produce, direct, or star in (I wasn't even a grip), smoking tobacco which I did not grow, cure or shred, sipping wine made from grapes I did not grow or juice, in a house built a century before I was even born.

Most of us, including me, take all this for granted most of the time. But to state it so bluntly, attribute it at least partly to government effort, and diminish the role of the business owner by saying "you didn't build that," says to me that Mr. Obama considers all American effort, and thus all Americans, as beholden to the government for every penny. Never mind the fact that I bust my ass forty hours a week to earn the tokens of exchange required to purchase the items listed above. Never mind the fact that I trade my effort for the effort of others in a fair and voluntary exchange. Never mind the fact that every such exchange increases to value of the items traded and thus the quality of life of the parties conducting the exchanges. No, I did not create the life I now live. It was all because of government.

Neither did I create the life I lived before I came here to Hazleton. That, in fact, was the fault of government. The pitiful wage I earned sporadically over several years -- the fault of over-regulation of certain industries and under-regulation of others -- entitled me to a pitiful $200 every two weeks in unemployment when the jobs finally dried up in 2008. You can't rent a room in this part of the country for that much. So, I became homeless. I lived in a tent, and gathered nuts and berries and fish to sustain my life. When an opportunity finally did present itself, the government alms I had saved helped get me a small room on a devastated downtown street and cab my way to work four days a week.

It's taken until now for my body to fully recover from the back-breaking effort of homelessness, and I now carry thousands of dollars less debt (paid off, not defaulted). My fingers and knees still hurt like mad on damp days, but the pain is a reminder of MY effort which has carried me this far. For certain, I didn't create the position I now hold, in a company that I didn't help found, selling products I don't make and shipping them in trucks I didn't build over roads I didn't lay, but the fruits of my effort are nonetheless MINE. The mere thought that it all could be appropriated by the government, that I could be left suddenly and utterly destitute at the whim of some pencil-pushing bureaucrat or corrupt office-holder, fills me with a rage I cannot properly express in words.

I don't like being angry. Some of you who have experienced my tantrums may have gotten the opposite idea, but anger makes me physically ill. It weakens my resolve, clouds my judgment, and frightens my fellow humans. While homeless, I didn't experience a single moment of anger. The work was torturous, every day a struggle, but my continued existence depended entirely upon my own will, my own effort, and not at all on anyone else's decision whether to help me or hinder me. I miss it sometimes.

Obama's comments, however misquoted, show me just where I stand in this "unbelievable American system" -- squarely beneath the boot of socialist despotism. (Unfortunately, Mitt Romney has not yet shown me any evidence that he would be able to do any better. Perhaps I should do a more in-depth analysis in a later blog. ) Where is the incentive to build anything beyond the menial labor I now provide? If it can all be taken away in an instant, I'd rather spend the extra effort building myself, learning and practicing skills which will help me sustain my life and help others to do so when the big grab happens, when I and millions like me are left with nothing. I am more convinced than ever that it will happen. I only hope we have enough time to prepare....

"Why Can't We All Just Get Along?"

"Why can't we all just get along?" This quote came from the late Rodney King, in an interview after his televised, unprovoked beating at the hands of white police officers. Such a simple and oft-quoted sentiment, but does anyone really stop to consider its meaning?

I used to work with an immigrant woman, whose name I will not reveal. Let's just call her "Mona." Mona came to the United States from a Caribbean nation with her parents when she was a teenager, decades ago. In all that time, she was never able to rid her speech of a thick Latin accent. She would say things like "refriyerator" and "hoppy" (happy). She was fired from a previous service position because she was supposedly hard to understand. When she got upset, her accent got so thick even I had trouble understanding her, but most of the time she was completely intelligible. She worked very hard, constantly struggling to crush the production rates, and worked overtime whenever it was available.

There was another co-worker who I'll call "Juan." Juan was straight off the boat from another Caribbean nation, and could barely speak two words of English. In the short time he was there, his English got better, but he still had to rely heavily on murmured Spanish conversations with his Latin co-workers to understand a lot of what was going on. Despite this handicap, I was able to successfully train him in a fairly complex warehouse operation, and he went on to become one of our best workers.

To this day I still have a great amount of respect for Mona and Juan, because they embody the values which "oriyinally" made America great (smiley). All of my Protestant ancestors came to America to escape religious persecution -- the Ulster Scots from the Anglicans, and the Pfalz Germans from the Roman Catholics. They left behind well-established economic and social infrastructures and travelled across the sea to an empty, wild continent, filled with beasts and savages -- and other cultures, who all came here for one overarching reason: to get a fresh start. The specifics were different for each group, but they all wanted to be left in peace to till their soil or ply their trade to earn their living.

My Scotch ancestors found in the ridges of the Appalachians a land not unlike the Highlands they left so far behind in their long trek. The Pfälzers settled in the broad valleys between the outlying foothills, in lands very similar to the Palatinate forests and vineyards. The Gaelic language was largely forgotten, but the Pfälzisch dialect grew into Pennsylvania Deutsch. Pennsylvania Deutsch was widely spoken until the early parts of the 20th century, when -- seemingly of one mind -- Deutsch parents refused to teach the language to their children. The Deutsch had long fallen under persecution in the English-speaking communities in which they peddled their agricultural goods, because many of them were unable to speak English. The stereotype of the "dumb Dutchman" was perpetuated under the false assumption that the Deutsch were "too stupid" to learn English. So they killed their language, and their culture with it. Many people from my generation are just now beginning to recapture the lost roots of their Pennsylvania Deutsch heritage.


It was in a similar fashion that I lost another cultural trait, which was a primary reason for the insularity of the former Pennsylvania Deutsch communities. I was in my twenties before I learned that my parents were staunch racists. I could well remember the expansive repertoire of racial epithets my great-grandmother used -- frequently and profusely -- but I had never heard my mother or my father utter a single one in my presence. They had been raised in the same cultural insensitivity which had made their grandparents targets of prejudice, but with the expansion of cultural diversity well under way in America they decided that their children would not be fettered by the limited vision of racism. So by the time I reached adulthood, I was well-prepared to share workspace with Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and a profusion of cultures and subcultures from around the world. It never entered my mind that I should treat anyone differently because of the color of their skin or country of origin. They were all just people to me.


My point is that racism is an eradicable condition. Mona and Juan, mentioned above, earned my respect because of their strict work ethic, and were not denied because they were "not like me." If parents who forbade their daughter from watching Puerto Rican Panorama on Saturday mornings because they didn't want her to hear "that spic-babble" were able to raise that same daughter to embrace the entirety of the human race as equals, then so can we all teach our own children to do so. It's important to be proud of your own heritage, but not to the exclusion of the heritage of others. This is what makes America such an interesting and popular country. A thirty-minute walk through any major American city will expose you to at least three different world cultures. In New York, you will likely hear snatches of nearly every language spoken on Earth within the space of a day. Cultural heritage is part of your identity, just like it is part of the identity of the person next to you, and the person next to him, and the person next to her, etc. They're all just like you.