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February 03, 2005
Mow Your Own Lawn
Interesting post by John Derbyshire at the Corner.
I've often wondered about this, as well. Certainly there are some jobs that parents might want their teenagers to avoid for issues of safety and a desire to enjoy being a teenager, but are we now incapable of mowing our own lawns? Painting our own houses? There are very few jobs Americans can't do; there are just a lot of jobs we won't do. Why? I'm not completely confident in my thesis, but I'll take a shot.
One of the reasons poor white Southerners supported secession was they felt that free blacks would make their own work seem less meaningful. If the slaves were freed to work on their own, then suddenly poor whites would find themselves at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder and in the same basket as the former slaves. At the time, one was hard-pressed to find a stronger form of degradation. Perhaps a similar thing has occurred today. Americans are no longer willing to work in manual labor because they'll find themselves working with poor immigrants.
I'm not trying to paint my fellow Americans as racists or nativists. There are practical barriers to immigrants working well with Americans, namely the issue of language. But aside from that, I wonder if our new attitude goes something like this:
I'll work a summer job at the Gap with other middle class kids, but I won't work at Burger King. I mean...have you seen who else works there?
Posted by Matt at February 3, 2005 11:25 AM