“Get a job!” was a common insult hurled at the hippies back when I was a kid. I remember a few of them homesteading in the woods off the dirt road to my favourite swimming hole on Vancouver Island. I remember the homegrown vegetable gardens and the hastily assembled log cabins and the pungent odour of their strange cigarettes.
I wouldn’t pay much attention if I was alone beyond noticing you could barely see their eyes under all that head and facial hair. But if my father was with me … well, then I’d hear a few lectures on the long, windy drive back home. The values of work, the satisfaction of a job well done, the “I had to walk 5 miles to school – both ways” speech that all parents at that time seemed to pull out of their back pockets at times like these.
I appreciated my father’s point actually … especially as I got older. But I sympathized with the rebels, too.
But now I’m noticing the same “Get a job!” catchphrase going out from Wall St. to all the OWS occupiers. For sure, work is needed for the liberation of the people. But not the work the 1% is thinking we need.
Working for Ourselves, today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head.