Is it good to get ahead?

I think that poor thing, where people have been poor for generations, is kind of a chicken and egg thing. The kids get a bad start on life because their parents are not so good, so they become not so good and then raise their kids poorly and on and on. The kid grows up in a crumby neighborhood, goes to a crumby school, has crumby pals, doesn’t have books in the house, doesn’t visit museums, doesn’t go on vacations to other parts of the country, and worst of all is he has to fight for everything he gets, that’s a lot of time spent fighting when he could be enriching his mind. And of course he is fighting all the time he is in school. That’s what makes the school crumby, everybody is fighting everybody else so that it’s all the teachers can do to to keep order and they don’t have time to teach anything. it’s not a crumby school because of the teachers who generally do the best they can, but they just get burned out.

You know when we were growing up, if some kid beat us up or stole our bike, we could go to our parents and they’d go to the other parents, and things would be worked out, we could get some justice, we wouldn’t have to try to jump the kid who beat us up, or to steal back our bike. And we didn’t have to watch out all the time for kids who might beat us up, and we could leave our bike alone for short periods of time without too much worry about it getting stolen.

Then those kids, when they get out of school, they haven’t had much of an education, and they likely don’t have a car so they can drive to a job far away, and their clothes aren’t that good when they go to the interview, so they end up with a crumby job, and people in crumby jobs are treated poorly, because they can easily be replaced, and they don’t have money for the doctor or a dentist, or a lawyer if they get into trouble. That’s pretty much what I mean that everything is harder for poor people.

I think there is a connection between doing good and doing work. We always admire the guy who works hard. We think the guy who keeps his house up and maybe makes additions and stuff is a good neighbor, but the guy who lets his house go to hell is a lousy neighbor. I’ll bet when you saw your daughter not going to the beach and finishing up that little bit you thought “Good girl.” If she never got a job and sponged off you, you would think she was not such a good girl. But then again if the family is rich, they might not care if the kid sponged or not. Well I’m going to back off on this. I think that a lot of people think a person who is a hard worker, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he is good. What if he is a gangster?

I think we’ve been around the argument of what exactly is good, and we agree that it is hard to define, but we have a general idea of what it means. What if you had two sons, and one was good, but he never got higher in employment than minimum wage, and you had another son who made a pile and was generally pretty good, but cut corners from time to time, which would you be prouder of? I think most people would take the second. I think you would take the first. I’ve posed this question to myself and I am a little embarrassed that I never knew exactly what my answer would be, but posing it to myself now I think I would also take the first. Maybe I have aged in wisdom.

Maybe the difference is earlier I had been working, and not so much when I was tending bar as later when I was working in offices, I always thought that I should be getting ahead. So maybe I thought it was more important then, then I do now that I am retired.

What about you, did you ever think you should be getting ahead?