November 2006 - Out Not with a Bang but a Bawk

By Anthony J. Lockwood

My Old Man grew up on a farm upstate New York where he developed a lifelong hatred of chickens. Chicken gravy on pancakes three meals a day will do that to you. As a kid, when we had bawker for dinner, right after grace my Old Man would chuckle at his entree:  “One less of you ]expletive deleted].”

As The Depression settled in, the Old Man drove from one county fair to the next in upstate NY and western New England making money beating up people. How it worked was that you’d pay a buck to see if you could knock him down or box him for two rounds. If you did, you won the pot. My grandmother, as hard-bitten a hen as you’ve ever met, worked the crowd taunting the farm boys until they sought to beat up her son in revenge.

The Old Man claimed that he never was knocked down, but he did weary of the motif after awhile. Boxing all afternoon and night is a hard way to make dough.

It was a different, rougher time than today. The official unemployment rate was in the 20 to 25 percent range, but the way they counted minorities,  it was probably higher. And the officially unemployed made money in lots of ways strange to us, like beating up people at country fairs.

But the New Deal was coming and people began to hope that, some day, they might not have to work themselves to death just to have a life. I’m beginning to wonder if that longing is starting to re-emerge in working stiffs like you and me today. Things just feel out of whack.

Example: We work more hours than anyone in the industrialized world. Rather than calling this paid servitude, we brag about being more productive than they. We’re in early, we leave late, and average 7 hours a week doing nonpaid stuff at home.

Americans have fewer paid holidays than anyone, 12 days on the average. And we also take less vacation than anyone. Remember those hardworking,  never-sleep Japanese? They take an average of five weeks of vacation,  We’re slipping down past 10 days.

A friend of mine lamented recently that all he ever asked of his employer was a two-week paid vacation and annual raise. Technically, he still gets the vacation, but because of staff cutbacks it hasn’t happened the last few years. He has company. Estimates vary, but it seems we forfeit 400 million or so earned vacation days a year.

He is also a part of a growing cohort of Americans that has agreed to pay cuts or freezes to help the company out. He hasn’t had a raise in three years and does not anticipate one next year. A bunch of his benefits were nixed, and his insurance premiums have doubled. Slowly, the lifestyle he works so hard for is being whittled away by the scalpel of social Darwinism.

But, the silly fool loves his job. I believe that’s our weakness. That and down deep inside of us is that family legend about an ancestor slogging day and night, year after year for the American Dream. Then they died. We do the same: We find a job we can do well, think we have to work as hard they did, and then we die. But sometimes when a friend drops dead, I wonder if somewhere a puppetmaster chuckles, “one less of you ]expletive deleted].”

Thanks, Pal—Lockwood

Lockwood is Anthony J. Lockwood is the Editorial Director of DE  Magazine. Dogs like him, but most humans suspect that something is amiss. Should you be so moved, you can send this, um, individual through e-mail by clicking here. Please reference “Diatribes, November 2006” in your message.