Finneran: America at the Morgue
Friday, July 24, 2015
There’s a body at the morgue. It’s America and she is as dead as a doornail…….no heartbeat and no pulse, with all vital signs cold and lifeless. More specifically, her central nervous system—i.e.—her legendary work ethic—is as dead as a dinosaur.
The evidence hit me hard the other morning at a Stop and Shop on Cape Cod. Every bagger, every cashier, every shelf-stocker was from Eastern Europe. Good for the Eastern Europeans who apparently know and appreciate a good thing when they see it. My question is where are the young American boys and girls, the high school sophomores, juniors, and seniors? Are they too cool to consider such honest work? Are they too lazy? Too spoiled? Do they consider such work too hard?
Are those missing American kids not in need of some spending money? Could not their families use a little financial help? Or might those kids not get a running start on their looming college tuitions?
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTLater that morning I spent some time with a successful local restauranteur and I raised the question with him about his summer employees. He rolled his eyes when discussing young American kids, their entitlement mentality, and their utter unreliability. His kitchen workforce is Jamaican, and his waitstaff is almost all Easter European. He has to pay about two thousand dollars in legal fees for each of these seasonal foreign workers, money that he’d prefer to spend on local kids and local families if only someone was willing to show up, to work, to sweat, and to perform.
The story is the same with landscapers…….few if any American kids will push a lawnmower, man a rake, or mulch a property as their day’s work. Ditto construction companies who are desperate for young kids to haul lumber, sheetrock, or brick to and from different worksites, perhaps setting up staging, perhaps mixing concrete, and almost certainly beginning to absorb the skills of various trades.
Young Jamaicans, Brazilians, Mexicans, Eastern Europeans, and others happily fill the vacuums created by America’s missing kids. They travel thousands of miles and live in a strange and foreign land for the simple opportunity to work hard for 15 or 20 weeks. What a contrast to our kids who apparently can’t or won’t get out of bed before noontime………….when the history of America’s rise and fall is written, the death of her work ethic must be cited as a wound which bled her dry.
How utterly unpredictable was this fall. For many generations America was renowned worldwide for habits of ingenuity, of industry, and of just plain hard work. Our “can-do” mentality created both awe and envy, appreciation and jealousy. Such awe is a thing of the past, a relic of a lost America.
One final, depressing thought---for those few remaining American kids who are hungry and eager for work, who show up early and who stay late, who have both a curiosity and an aptitude for broadening their skills, who demonstrate that historic “American drive” and who are not afraid to sweat, they should be prepared for the worst. Our politics have become so rancid and so ridiculous that they will be labeled “privileged” or, later in life, “one-percenters”. They will be attacked as greedy and selfish. Neither praise nor respect nor appreciation awaits their efforts and their accomplishments. Rather, they are doomed for they are the final flailing twitches of a body which died some time ago.
America, RIP.
Tom Finneran is the former Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, served as the head the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council, and was a longstanding radio voice in Boston radio.
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