Okay! Finally! What is wrong with hard work?

If you are called to be a street sweeper, sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry.  Sweep the streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, “Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.”

Unless you are a student of the person I am quoting, you will have to wait until the end of this essay to know the source.  The statement was made over sixty years ago by somebody who knew hard work and, in the course of his life, was elevated to the status of an American icon.

Contrast that statement with the exchange between Newt Gingrich and Juan Williams in a recent debate of the Republican Presidential candidates.  Juan Williams asked Gingrich if he could possibly be aware of how insulting and offensive it was to the “African American community” to hear somebody like Gingrich suggest that young African American males do janitorial work around their schools.

I did janitorial work around my school, even delivered milk to other students in my school.

Juan Williams is not a bad man.  In fact, his spirited defense of Bill Cosby was both passionate and necessary when Cosby called out African American families and demanded they do better by their children.  And yet, taking form within the ideology of modern day Liberalism is that most work is beneath the dignity of certain subsectors of the American pluralist system.  Unfortunately, bright and authoritative people like Juan Williams have swallowed this flotsam, lock, stock, and barrel.

I don’t really care for Gingrich that much, but his view of the spectrum of work to management to ownership seems to me to be the very thing that will deliver the ultimate political and economic emancipation to Black America. 

I come by these beliefs honestly.  My mother preached “the dignity of all work even if it is cleaning a toilet.”  It was and is inconceivable that in my life that any productive work or any productive enterprise could possibly be insulting or offensive or ever beneath my dignity.

The phrases, “chump change” and “hamburger flipper” have hardened into pathologies that discourage and otherwise prevent would be entrants to the work force from gathering the tools they need to advance and become better productive and caring human beings.

In my youth, in addition to helping clean up my elementary school, I delivered the Detroit Free Press at four o’clock in the morning to 110 people, everyday, whether Christmas or ten below zero.  I cleaned a hotel kitchen every day.  The smell of rotting cabbage leaves is permanently embedded in my nasal sensors.  I night clerked at the same hotel.  I bagged groceries, stocked shelves, and mopped and waxed the floors of a local grocery store.

At the university, I continued to do grocery store work, collected dirty laundry, and distributed clean laundry.  I served as a supervisor in my dormitory, trying to make thirty six guys behave.  I worked on the Great Lakes ore freighters where I cleaned my share (and Juan Williams’ share) of dirty toilets.  In graduate school, I worked in a wine and cheese shop, riding my bicycle to work seven miles one way.

I served as a research assistant to numerous professors.  I was given the jobs they did not want to do—for good reason.

None of this was offensive.  None of this was insulting.  Every job, no matter how disagreeable, was a step toward something better.  This was a crucial part of my life and a crucial part of my eventual career as a Chief Executive Officer of a nonprofit corporation.  My training convinced me that no work was beneath the dignity of the CEO if it was in the interest of the company to be successful.  So I answered phones and licked stamps when it became necessary.

Suddenly we live in an era where elites like Juan Williams have created and enhanced a toxic culture that just about eliminates the possibility that a young African American could do what I did with my work life.  And yet, here I stand, taking great pride in all the work I have done.  I am retired, but I have used my gains to help finance educational opportunities for African American students interested in aviation and aerospace careers.  I do this in spite of the toxic culture that does everything it can to put the lid on the aspirations of African American youth and otherwise confine them to government or street dependency.

Is it any wonder that young people, being fed this garbage by so-called respected leaders in society, bear the burden of this loser culture comprised of inept educational systems, horrifying dropout rates, violence, and a total incapacity to live productively, let alone compete globally against people who revere education and are not at all afraid to get their hands dirty?

The quote?  Oh yes, it came from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

So, if you ever visit the King Memorial in Washington, D.C., and you see a tear run down the great man’s face, you will know why.