Remembering Freedom also available from Amazon.
My first job was pulling watermelons for my neighbor in the hot SC summer sun, walking and working beside people whose grandfathers had been enslaved by the grandfather of our now employer. I remember that I got paid $5.00 an hour for anything less than a half-day work, $25.00 for a half day, and $50.00 for a full day. I can also remember the excitement my brothers and I felt when the federal minimum wage jumped from $5.00 an hour to $7.00 an hour - we all thought we were getting a raise. But as so many under-the-table jobs go, our pay did not rise to match the federal update: we continued with the same pay scale as we currently had. That was alright, though: we chalked it up to not having a “real” job yet, and that things would be much more “official” when we had “real” jobs. It was, simply put, a sentiment that would refrain time and time again - one that reflects a longstanding yet recently challenged societal position as we enter more deeply into the inherited ramifications of the Enlightenment.
During my senior year of high school, I swapped out pulling watermelons during the summer for a job that would continue even during the colder months: the local hardware store. Our town was small (microscopic, compared to some!), and you can only sweep the floor, inventory the stock, and rearrange the display so many times. At a certain point, human creativity will combine with boredom to create some pretty ingenious things. And so, my days at the store saw me eating up the mass amounts of dead time between customers with anything from taking the leather from our recent cow and braid it into a bullwhip, to hand-writing poems and theological apologies, to even fashioning our own checker board from nuts and bolts. It was alright, I justified, because this was such a small town it didn’t constitute a real job. Real jobs wouldn’t see me with so much down time in between customers with no more legitimate work to do until one were to show up.
Off I went to college right after graduation. Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts had at the time one of the premier humanities programs out of all its peers. It also boasted the power to award the Apostolic Catechetical Diploma. Small though the school was, its excellent program of studies, coupled with its rigorous observation and celebration of the Sacred Liturgies, all set on the backdrop of its multi-million dollar campus nestled in the beautiful Blue Hills mountains of Warner New Hampshire enabled this school, in my opinion, to rival the academic prowess of many larger schools. How surprised I was, then, to find that when I got there many of my fellow students were prone to make complaints based on the premise that we were not a “real” school. What a “real” school was - besides being somewhat bigger with more money - was never really defined in these complaints. All I would get when I would ask was simply that we wouldn’t have to endure x, y, or z policy, whichever one that was the current object of opposition. Nevertheless, I thought to myself, I understand that this was a small (again, microscopic to some!) school, and that there were unique problems and quirks to having a school small.
I married very shortly after leaving life on a college campus. Finding myself newly married in a new state with no connections, no friends, no marketable skills (YOU try finding employment when your resume boasts nothing more than watermelon picking and an undergraduate degree in philosophy/liberal arts!) and an immediate need for income, I found myself working with a dual hat of producer/Human Resources for a small packaging company in Cleveland, OH. This company effectively packaged hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of product for various multi-million dollar companies worldwide - and had done so at the time for decades. This being said, the employee number at this company was well under 30 at any given time - and sometimes even in the mere single digits. You might not be surprised, given the trajectory of this conversation, to hear that I was surrounded by incessant comments about the company’s legitimacy: never a day went by when some quirk of company life wasn’t lamented and complained about in terms of “we wouldn’t have to do x, y, or z if we were a real company!” And even here, at what you might consider my first “real” job, I discounted and “understood” these complaints: we were such a small company, we were allowed to have a more “human” approach to employment than some of the supposed colder, authoritative, and “official” approaches of larger companies.
I wish I could say that the cries for the “real life” to stand up stopped with this place of employment. You may or may not be surprised to hear that this would not be the case. How surprised I was, at any rate, when not long after this I found myself at Basic Combat Training and were surrounded by “if we were in the real Army,” or “once we get to a real unit,” such and such a problem would not be the case anymore. I began to wonder: what is this real Army that people keep supposing exists with more surety than the life that is literally surrounding us! I would continue that wondering when I was surrounded by those same complaints of un-reality on my first deployment, my 2 year stint as an armored car driver at the oldest operable branch of the largest security company in the entire world, my second deployment, and, ultimately, by those who would criticize my position as an adoptive (and therefore not real) parent.
Eventually, through all of these experiences, I began to realize: human nature struggles to recognize reality, especially here in the 21st century. The same defects that caused the Jews to reject Christ (how could this be the Messiah) have finally found philosophical traction and consequence as found in societal structure. The Enlightenment, the Social Contractors, Baconian/Machiavellian approaches to reality, and Kantian metaphysics have paved the way for an anthropology and epistemology that would isolate Man from his fellow, set keep him in the confines of his own subjectivity, and create a worldview so absurd as to be invincible in its ability to shut down conversations: when everything can be boiled down to my point of view, no knowledge of the “real” world - let alone discussion about what that means - is possible. The necessary result? Freedom means the ability to do what you wish and desire - so long as you don’t step on anyone else’s toes. And, as a corollary, any prohibition on your desires makes you less free. It is indeed a lonely worldview to find yourself in.
