This clip looks like a lot later than 1936, but these are examples of those "high paying factory jobs" that were either displaced by new technology, or outsourced to countries with cheaper labor. That started in the 1970's, dramatically increased in the 80's and 90's, and continues today. By and large, these jobs were physical, menial, repetitive, boring, and largely sucked. But they paid well, at least after the unions got going after World War II. Most of the people I grew up around worked this type of factory job, and nearly everyone hated the jobs they spent 40 or 50 hours a week at. The Generation X kids of my era, and those before us, were taught that doing a job you hated all day, every day, for your whole working life, was simply the way life was, and there was nothing you could do about it.
"Don't do what you hate."
-Jesus of Nazareth
This morning, I was walking towards the restroom of a large bus stop that I pass through every morning. One of the bus drivers was walking up from behind me, heading to the private, driver's restrooms. As he walked by, a homeless woman asked him what bus to take to a certain street. Without slowing down, the driver told her the bus number as he walked by her. She said she thought it was another bus. For no apparent reason, the bus driver went into a tirade as he continued to walk towards the restroom.
"No lady, I'm giving you bad information, I give you damn people (homeless looking people, apparently) free rides, I put up with your shit all day, and I give out bad information..." He just kept shouting on and on. At that point, he was walking past me, at a much faster pace. It was a bout 6:00 am, and the buses don't run all night, so he was near the beginning of his shift, he hadn't been on the job that long today. I hadn't had any caffeine yet this morning, and I'm homeless and sleep on concrete every night, at the moment, and I was in a much better mood than this guy. I said, "Damn!" as he passed by, not sure why a simple question about a bus route sparked such anger so early in the morning. He kept shouting as he walked ahead of me, no far past the woman who asked the question.
"Who peed in your Cheerios?" I asked rhetorically, and in my typical sarcastic fashion, not really thinking he heard me. He did hear me. Then he started yelling at me. I can't even remember everything he said, something about him working a "real" job all week, and then, now 50 feet ahead of me, he yelled, "Get a job!" "I have a job," I said instinctively. The bus driver kept shouting, and I could hear him still screaming from the driver's bathroom as I took a leak in the public restroom.
Yes, we all have bad days, we all get frustrated by things that happen in our lives, and at work, and we sometimes snap at people when we shouldn't. But this tirade by the bus driver this morning was so ridiculously out of proportion to the initial incident, that it was funny, not just pathetic. Bus drivers make decent money. I just looked it up, right now you can get a $1,500 signing bonus and start at $15.60 an hour, plus benefits. There's a $2,500 signing bonus if you have a year of experience and already have your CDL. But obviously, that guy was not a happy camper. I saw him a few minutes later by the lunch truck at the bus stop, and he had calmed down.
About that time, the bus I intended to take rolled up, but didn't pull all the way up in the loading zone. The driver got out, hit the restroom, and got back in his bus. By the way he was parked, I wasn't sure if he was going out of service, or if he was the next bus leaving. Since I don't have a traditional job, I wake up at different times, and catch the next bus whenever I come through, which can range over about an hour and a half's time each morning. The bus I was watching pulled away from the big bus stop as soon as he got it running, with nobody on it. Then, away from the loading area, he turned on the front sign, showing that he actually was in service. He just didn't want to bother with any passengers at that stop, which has a bunch of homeless people camped out, and sometimes taking morning buses. I've seen that same driver pull away as I walked up to his bus, waving for him to wait 20 seconds, so I could catch it.
These two guys, who both, obviously, hate their jobs, first thing in the morning, got me thinking about a couple of things. The first thing was it reminded me of the quote from none other than Jesus of Nazareth himself, "Don't do what you hate." Yes, Jesus actually said that, yet you will probably never hear that quote in any church. I'll get more into this later in this post. To those two angry bus drivers, if you hate your job, 1), admit it to yourself, and then 2), work towards finding a better job or way to make money that you don't hate.
The second thing that came to mind was the question, "What exactly is my job?" I don't have a traditional job, and I 'm currently homeless. There has been an incredible ramping up of hatred and prejudice against homeless people in the last 10 to 20 years, and I'm commonly treated as a subhuman by people on a day to day basis. One of the many misconceptions about homelessness is that because someone doesn't a apartment or house to live in at the moment, that they have no skills, and no knowledge of anything. That's simply not true. These days, there are a lot of talented and once hard working people who are homeless, many are there due to medical issues.
All that stuff aside, I write blog posts nearly every day, some sharing Old School BMX stories, but many others about where our society is heading, thoughts on how to address the issues in today's world, and thoughts on economic matters, because money affects everyone's life. I've spent my life watching the financial markets, and reading a few hundred books, mostly non-fiction, that most people don't want to read. I've also listened to hundreds and hundreds of audio books, speeches, workshops, TED Talks, and other talks on lots of smart subjects. I spend a lot of time thinking about the future, and what problems we are going to run into, and have to deal with, in the future we're all headed towards. Few people seem interested in this stuff, but I keep writing, and keep trying to find the aspects of these issues that people can connect with and use to make their lives better.
In my self-directed studies, I've come across the work of Simon Sinek ("The Origin of the Why") in the last year or so, and his concept of figuring out the "Why?" of what's most important to us, and working our life or business out from that fundamental understanding. He can put his "Why?" into a simple sentence, and I've been trying for the last couple of months to put my own "Why?" into one concise statement. I spent this past weekend thinking and trying to figure out exactly where to go from this point. I'm in a new situation, I've found some basic stability, the first step in working out of homeless. I need to make money on a day by day basis to survive. But I need to work in a larger context, building my current skills and talents into a viable small business and an actual living.
Somehow, sparked by the bus driver's tirade this morning, my own "Why?" suddenly became clear. My personal, interest driven studies have combined three big social theories into a kind of overall worldview, and in this worldview, all the crazy shit happening these days make sense. Our whole society is in a really long transition period, that I call The Big Transition. To put it as simply as possible, every single part of our society is going to be reinvented or re-imagined. We're moving from the old, Industrial Age way of thinking and working, into the new, Information Age way of thinking and working. But we're not there yet. Everything is in transition. That's why things are so chaotic. It's sort of like Western society itself is going through puberty.
Many of the things I've read and learned, most of which didn't seem to have anything to do with each other at first, now give me a framework to describe this transitional period of change, explain why it's happening, and, hopefully, help people and businesses find their way from the old way of doing things to a new way that makes sense in today's world, and the future we're heading into.
My "Why?" is: I explain to people why today's world seems so chaotic, put it in larger context, and help people work towards finding their own new way of doing things that works in the Information Age.
So I'd like to thank that pissed off bus driver this morning. Your freakout, whatever led to it, sparked me to find a new understanding of what my work really is all about. My work doesn't make much money at the moment, but I'm working towards a higher income, in a 21st century kind of way. One really cool thing about the Information Age is that you don't have to do a job you hate your whole life. Pretty much anyone can work towards doing something they enjoy, if they're willing to learn the skills needed, and take responsibility for building their own income around that. There will be a lot less of "working 40 hours a week for a steady paycheck" in the future. As many as half of today's traditional jobs will be taken over by new technology in the next 20 years. Bus driver's jobs may be gone in 5 to 10 years.
That brings me back to that quote from Jesus of Nazareth, "Don't do what you hate." It's from quote #6 in The Gospel of Thomas. The full text of that quote (source here), is :
"His disciples asked him and said to him, 'Do you want us to fast?' 'How should we pray?' 'Should we give to charity?' 'What diet should we observe?'
"Jesus said, 'Don't lie, and don't do what you hate, because all things are disclosed before heaven. After all, there is nothing hidden that won't be revealed, and there is nothing covered up that will remain undisclosed."
No it's not in the Bible. But it is in The Gospel of Thomas, a group of sayings of Jesus of Nazareth, collected and recorded by Thomas, one of Jesus' 12 original disciples. If you're not a religious person, don't worry, I'm not trying save you, convince you to adopt my belief system, or get you to go to a certain church. That's not my thing, there are plenty of people out there that will gladly tell you everything you believe is wrong, and that they hold the only way of salvation, but not me.
Most of those same people will say this quote from Jesus is bullshit (they may say "bullpuckey"), because it's not in the actual Bible. Here's what funny about that, there were a whole bunch of early scriptures in use among the early followers of Jesus in the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd centuries A.D.. Some of them, but not all of them, are included in what we now call the Bible.
In 1945, some documents were discovered in sealed jars in a cave, similar to the more famous Dead Sea Scrolls, but those were Jewish writings, parts of the Old Testament of the Bible, and other writings. The Nag Hammadi texts were named after the city in Egypt near where they were found. These writings include the only full text of The Gospel of Thomas, which is believed to date from the second century A.D., 67- 167 years after the actual death of Jesus of Nazareth.
The oldest surviving version of what can be called the Bible, a collection of many of those early texts, is the Codex Vaticanus, is housed in the Vatican library, where nobody is allowed to see it. It dates to the early 4th century, 300 to 350 A.D.. That's 267 to 367 years after the actual death of Jesus of Nazareth. Here's my point, the quote of Jesus, which includes the directive, "Don't do what you hate," is at least 200, maybe 300 years older, than the oldest surviving version of the collection of scriptures known as the Bible itself. So you can't just brush The Gospel of Thomas away and say it doesn't matter. We have a copy that dramatically predates the oldest complete copy of the Bible that exists. There are many pieces and fragments and individual books of the Bible that predate Codex Vaticanus, but the oldest surviving complete "Bible," is a couple of hundred years newer than the complete version of The Gospel of Thomas. That's why I , myself, wanted to read it, when doing my own research on what religion, spirituality, and the teachings of Jesus, and other spiritual leaders about 20-30 years ago. There's a lot of crap that's been added to religions, all of them, over 2,000 or more years, and I wanted to try and figure out what the underlying truth was. That's what led to my own reading of the "Gnostic Gospels," and the Nag Hammadi library texts.
This all leads to the obvious question, "If Jesus said, "Don't do what you hate," why don't any churches ever mention that? That's a really good question. The truth is, ministers at traditional Christian churches pick a Bible verse to preach from (or it's picked for them), every week. They almost NEVER use actual quotes from Jesus himself. That's one thing I noticed growing up in several Lutheran churches, and also saw in the Methodist churches I've gone to. This is a really good question that I doubt many pastors would give a really good answer to. I think the reason is that much of today's "Christian" ideology can't be backed up by the actual teachings of Jesus himself. But that's a whole 'nother can of worms...
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