"Mike Rowe and our need to respect blue collar jobs"

Linky

Melissa Harris-Perry has a problem with the term "hard work"

It reminds her of slavery. Melissa Harris-Perry keeps a picture of slaves working in a cotton field to remind her what hard work really means.

She makes a thoughtful point.

A very fine point from a pinched perspective through polarized sunglasses peeking through leveler window slats while wearing horse blinders and holding a toilet paper tube up to one eye with a kaleidoscope extender and a prism taped on the end, the other eye pinched shut. But a point.

Harris-Perry told a Republican Latino to be careful using the term when he spoke about  Paul Ryan. She presumed to lay out precise terms Republicans can and cannot say and why that is so delivering the customary critical race theories with added sexist positioning.

Crackpot. I think something rude and dismissive and move on.

But no, conservative people find this interesting. They actually respond. And boy, do they. Thoughtfully so. More thought than it is worth, actually but nonetheless thoughtful. Mike Rowe delivers an excellent rebuttal, unfortunately published on FaceBook. I'll summarize so you don't have to click over there.

He displays a photo of his face leaning on wall next to another photo of himself scrubbing a horrible toilet.

No longer a limit to what people can be offended by.

She's put off that hard work is linked with success. And that hard workers are not so successful as Paul Ryan. There is inequality between hard work and realized success introducing the term "relative privilege" and then introducing unfairness in sexes and hard work using an example of woman without healthcare.

 She says we call them failures
 She says we call call them sucking from the system.

Mike Rowe responds that Harris-Perry having pictures of slaves to remind her what hard work really looks like is the same thing as hanging pictures of rape and bondage to remind one of the true nature of human sexuality looks like.

Rowe thinks a few things are glaringly obvious to anyone other than a Wake Forest professor type so he must back up and point out a few fundamentals.

There is a difference between regular hard work and forced labor. There is a big difference between modern options available and concomitant choices made regarding career paths, marriage and divorce, child bearing and family rearing, contrasted with what went on back then in history.

Conflating hard work and forced labor minimizes the importance of decent work ethic while diminishing the horror of slavery. And we do this all the time with phrases like "my boss sure is a slave driver" and my paycheck is a "slave's waves." Melissa comes corkscrewing in from the back side of things by seeing certain hard workers not prospering as other hard workers so be "super careful" about overly-praising hard work.

"Relative privilege" is a way of recognizing life is unfair. The term prepares unsuspecting viewers for the suggestion that slavery is proof that hard work doesn't pay.

His response receives its own mostly positive responses but FaceBook being Facebook there will be some expected uncomprehending. One commenter writes, "I don't see where Melissa Harris mentions anything about slavery. So Rowe's whole explanation is based on something Harris didn't say."

I have to get off FB and delete its tracking cookies.

Michelle Malkin also writes only in academia is the color-coding of one's work ethic seen as the apex of progressive enlightenment, while gender weighted too.

The center of Michelle's position is a recent trip she took to College of Ozarks, Hard Work U. It's founder, James Forsyth, received inspiration from a young boy who told him he had to drop out of school due to poor finances. Forsyth founded a private Christian four-year school for economically disadvantaged. 90% of students demonstrate financial need. All are required to work for the campus group or institution. The college carries no institutional debt and codifies debt avoidance into its character education. Michelle counters white privilege is a cynical construct of liberal elites dependent on grievance narratives to stoke controversy. She says she saw kids doing all kind of slave-labor-y things all over the college, mowing lawns, making beds, sweeping floors, washing dishes. Many are first in their family to attend college. And during that trip and making these observations it never occurred to Michelle Malkin to rank the industriousness of hard-working young people all around her by race.

Mike Rowe Posts #BlueLivesMatter Video on FB

Link to video

PolitiBrew: Mike Rowe and His S.W.E.A.T. Pledge Scholarships: Cool!

"Remember Mike Rowe from that dirty jobs show where he'd go work with folks who have the dirtiest jobs there are, like working in sewers and such? I love that guy, and he speaks with such good sense it's difficult to disagree with him on anything I've thus far heard."

He's funny, smart, wise, and has a desire to see America regain her greatness, and her greatness resides in her people, her workers, and producers. He offers scholarships to young people too, so they can get educations in fields of endeavor where jobs are plentiful yet companies cannot fill.

During his show which chronicled so many dirty jobs and the people that perform them, he says he's counted 40-some-odd millionaires. For example, a family that runs a very lucrative mushroom farm. Americans love them some mushrooms. Now in running a mushroom farm, there are two things which are imperative, and you can probably guess what those two are. I'm talking about the one which is not shade.

Mike Rowe posted S.W.E.A.T. (Skills & Work Ethic Aren’t Taboo) Pledge on Facebook that is just the kind of straight talk we need to have with ourselves as a country to get that “can-do” spirit back. 

 

 

Read the pledge after the jump

Guest Posts Welcome

Yesterday. in my "I like This Idea for a Post This Morning" (still going strong today) I asked yous guys (a little Trooper lingo there) to suggest topics, that may have gone "neglected", for us to post, discuss, chew over, kick around etc... And, the never disappointing, always obliging, Bagoh20, (Bags, as I call him) shared something I thought I make into a "guest post".

I think something that is very important to a huge number of real people, yet is rarely covered is the subject of opportunity. How can people young and old find, develop, and exploit opportunities to succeed, grow, and build things outside of the standard and over-used one of go to school, go to more school, succeed at school, and then when you are already grown up, go figure out how to make a living by talking someone into hiring you to do what THEY want you to do.

It's not a plan for happiness or self-fulfillment for many people. It's a path based on maintaining the security of doing what you are supposed to for as long as you can pull it off. It's avoiding risk, avoiding challenge, and missing your calling as an individual. It delays for as long as possible your contributing to the people around you, which is how you become self-sufficient - by people needing your work.

The only place I see this stuff addressed is in the work of Mike Rowe. We need more discussion about how people can become valuable assets to their community through self-development that starts out very quickly paying off, and keeps building that throughout a life.

Our education system is a shambles of narrow political experimentation and pet projects of a few philosophies which are antagonistic toward diversity and unconcerned with results. They are experiments insistent on proving their hypothesis with no interest in real results for individuals. Failure is ignored and success is manufactured, and failure is what a great many are getting.

We need more discussion, exploration and experimentation with teaching trades, commerce, business building, how to work in a way where you parlay your minor successes into big ones over a lifetime.

Many immigrants are learning these things, and leaving natives behind in the area of personal development and growth because they arrive without the standard plan as an option, blocking their view of their real opportunities. The reason that immigrants take so many jobs is that they take the damned job. Then, they run with it, advance, start businesses. They don't see their parents' couch as the only alternative to college or a cushy job.

Many millionaires and highly successful, self-actualized individuals and families living great lives owe little or nothing to the standard plan.

I'm not against education - I still work on it every day for myself - but the way it is being done and sold is mostly a scam - a high end version of the stuff sold on late night TV as get-rich-quick lies. They take your money, waste you valuable time, and in the end, leave you to your own devices anyway, but wounded and broke.

That's a lot of rant against what isn't working, but I see the successful people all around me, including myself, and many found a different ways, which people don't really see anymore. They are there. They should be better known.

Thanks Bags. This post also gave me the opportunity to plum the tags bar. (mix metaphors, too late)

12 Reasons Why Obama Is Not One Of The Best Presidents Ever

A brief review of "12 Reasons Why Obama Is One Of The Best Presidents Ever" by Matthew Lynch, Ed.D

First, read the following and see if you take offense at some of the words. It's merely Lynch's opening salvo with a few racial tags replaced.

I have yet to find the words to describe the overwhelming sense of satisfaction I felt on Tuesday Nov. 8, 2016 when Ted Cruz won the popular vote by 53 percent. With tears in my eyes, and joy in my heart, I as a white man stood alongside other white people across the nation as we celebrated America's first inauguration of a Latino president. As an old white man, I felt a true sense of patriotism as I witnessed our country rally together to show, finally, that we are more concerned about who is the most qualified man for the job, regardless of race or age. As Cruz so simply, yet eloquently, stated during his celebration speech - real change had come to America -a change we so desperately needed after eight painful years of Barack H. Obama's colossal failure as our nation's leader.

I wonder if Lynch would have a problem with that.

The Dirty Jobs

Mike Rowe on the very same topic, sort of: link

'Today, skilled trades are in demand. In fact, there are 3 million jobs out there that companies are having a hard time filling. So we thought that skilled trades could do with a PR campaign,' he said with a smile. 'So we took the same idea, went ahead and vandalized it. Work smart AND hard.'

What Rowe is saying is that the 4-year college degree is not for everyone. I was halfway through high school when I saw my father lose his job as union printer at Madison Newspapers, Inc. That was over 35 years ago -- right at the beginning of the 40-year period Rowe puts his finger on. My reaction then was to buck up and actually get into college -- the first one in my family -- which is something that you only hear minorities touting these days. That move worked for a long time. But things have changed, especially for young people and older (50+) people. We face unprecedented changes, and nobody has a long term solution.