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| Kids like having a lemonade stand to earn money. This kid is working in the Farmers' Market in NYC's Union Square on Saturdays, but I can't see any different than this than having a lemonade stand. It gives him work experience and installs in him the work ethic. |
In the middle to upper-middle class society where I grew up, back in the 1950's, women who worked were looked down on as inferior to women who didn't have to work. The ethos back then was that women worked only because they had to, not because they wanted to.
I hated this way of thinking and revolted against it. I saw getting a job and working as my avenue to independence, especially from my family.
Gingrich talks about poor kids who don't have any work ethic. I grew up among upper-middle class kids who hadn't any work ethic. One of the upper-middle class values back in the 1950's was that working kids were looked down as being lower class. At least this was how it was in my neighborhood. This is just the opposite of what Gingrich was saying. In the environment of my youth (generally the West Los Angeles area) it was the poor who worked and the upper-middle class who didn't. People presumed that the reason the kids worked was because they came from poor families.
Many liberals are saying that Gingrich is advocating children being janitors and cleaning out toilets. He never said anything about making children clean toilets. He only said it wouldn't harm them to pick up a broom once in a while. I totally agree with that. I think children should have regular duties they perform at home, too, and it wouldn't hurt to have a small duty like this to perform at school. I was also raised by my grandmother, who never gave me any household chores to do, and because of that I was turning out very irresponsible. My school picked up and that, and I was given a little job at school of ringing the bell after recess for everyone to come in. This helped me. When I was in Junior High School, I also got a job of working in the cafeteria at lunch time. In return for this I got a free lunch. They gave me this job because I was always arriving at school without a lunch or lunch money.
My mother was never strong enough to become financially independent from her family, even though she was a well-trained secretary who earned a fairly good salary. She put up with all kinds of emotional abuse (even physical) because she never could be financially free from them. I didn't want that to happen to me. I started working as soon as I could by making things and trying to sell them and babysitting. The day I turned 16, I went to Santa Monica and got my social security card. The next day I got a part-time job at a five-and-ten cents store in Westwood Village, where I worked on Monday nights and Saturdays for the next year. My mother never encouraged me to work and said that back home in Kansas, girls who worked in 5-and-10 cent stores were looked down on. Even though this hurt, and I never forgot it, I was smart enough to pass it off as being insane. I started working full-time at the age of about 18 and became financially independent.
At 16, my mother was incarcerated in the State Mental Institution by the State of California, and I went to live with a family of a screen/TV writer in Bel Air. This family had exactly the same set of values as my mother. Women who worked were inferior to those who didn't. No one could understand a woman working unless she had to for financial reasons. The only socially acceptable avenue for a woman was marriage. They wouldn't listen to any idea I had for my future except to marry and become a housewife, as this woman had done. Successful women were looked down on even more. As though they were putting all their energies into working because they couldn't get a husband. I still revolted against this line of thought and it made me not have much respect for my new family. In this family, I felt that the man felt that if his wife worked, he wouldn't feel needed any more. The male aspect of this ethos was that men had to support their family entirely in order to feel needed and important. They saw their wife working and earning money as a possible threat.
However, in a way I did buy into this ethic of women who worked were inferior, because I never took classes in high school that would help me to earn a living once I got out, nor even when I went to City College. Girls who took vocational classes, in my social set, were looked down on as being intellectually inferior. Fortunately, I did at least take a typing class which gave me my in to the corporate world where I always managed to get a job.
In my later years, after I moved to Staten Island, I came into contact with an entirely different group of people that I never knew existed before. In the USA, there is an entire level of female society that start having children when they are 16 and start being supported by the government. They have no intention of working, nor did they ever, but keep having children, because with each one they get a little more federal or state money. These girls come most often from families where their mother did the same thing. Nothing more were never expected from them so they quit school as soon as they can. I have no idea how to cure this social problem, except maybe by the educational system. There is a male counterpart to this kind of thinking. Once a middle-aged man told me that his father told him that working for a living (something he had never done) was really dumb. This cycle of government dependence has to be broken.
However, to say that all poor people are like this, or all people who live in poor neighborhoods, are like this is not true. I live in a poor neighborhood and I've never been that way, and people all around me are working. The neighborhood I live in is full of immigrants, mostly from Mexico and Latin America, who are anxious to work, and who work all they can. I can't see any reason to be against these immigrants (illegal or not) who will work at anything, and to support all these Americans who think it's stupid to work. It's also stupid to think that anyone can find a job who really wants one. After I turned 50, I really had a hard time finding work even though I had good skills and was trying every minute. I was a much better employee, with much better skills, than when I was a pretty young girl, but I couldn't find work like I could when I was a pretty young girl. My working experience was always in the corporate world--I only say this as to reference my frame of mind.
It has always amazed me how some people live their entire lives by some stupid thing that their parents told them (i.e., working is dumb) as though it never occurs to them that maybe their parents were wrong. I still run into this kind of thinking all the time. I hate it when people say "Well, that's how I was raised," as an answer to why they do something that is not beneficial or bright. I've always detested people who never learned to think for themselves.
