Talk About Lazy...

Paul Krugman has a piece about conservatives in general, and John Boehner in particular, blaming lazy unemployed people for all our problems. The story on Huffington Post Krugman references mentions Paul Ryan:

During a talk-radio interview, the Wisconsin Republican spoke of a "tailspin of culture in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value of work."

Ryan later said his remarks were "inarticulate."

At the time, Representative Barbara Lee, a California Democrat, said Ryan's remarks were a "thinly veiled racial attack" in which "inner-city" was a code word for "black."

That got me thinking about the entire concept of laziness.

When I was kid my dad would at times call me lazy because I spent all my time reading, mostly about science and science fiction. When I was in junior high computers just started becoming available in schools, and I spent hours and hours playing around writing silly little BASIC programs (I even got into a little trouble doing this). I did the classic kid jobs, delivering newspapers and cleaning little old ladies' apartments. But my "lazy" leisure activities did much more to prepare me for work than the meager paychecks I received for my menial labors -- my first real job was at a library and after college I went into software engineering.

I was not unlike all those "lazy" inner city black kids who spend all their time on leisure activities such as playing basketball (like Michael Jordan and LeBron James). Then there all those "lazy" suburban burnouts who spend countless hours in the garage pounding on drums or hammering out guitar chords, while their parents and neighbors complain about the noise (like Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan). Then there are the "lazy" daydreamers who spend all their time in a fantasy world, reading about hobbits and spaceships (like Steven King and George R. R. Martin). And then there all those "lazy" kids who spend their every waking moment playing video games (like Michael Morhaime, CEO of Blizzard Entertainment, producer of World of Warcraft).

Are you really lazy if you devote a huge amount of time and effort to get really good at something?

I was lucky that my youthful "laziness" primed me for a career in software, which happens to pay well. When I going to college my younger brother told me I was wasting my time going to school. Two years later I was "lending" him money to take a course in heavy machinery operation. I retired in my forties and he's still scrambling to find a job after getting laid off recently. It is really hard for a 54-year-old man to find work, and after 35 years of physical labor you start getting pretty beat up, which further limits your options. Are you really lazy if no one will hire you to do the job that you're good at?

I don't fault my brother for not going to college. Not everyone is cut out to be a programmer; we need heavy equipment operators. But because of the physical demands, it's a job that you won't necessarily be able to do for 40 years.

"Lazy" is what politicians call people who are doing something they don't approve of. Those "lazy" black kids playing basketball are working a hell of lot harder than they would be if they were mopping floors, but there's only so much demand for professional basketball players.

Millions of people want to be professional athletes, singers, guitarists, painters, actors, authors, songwriters and screenwriters, and have worked their butts off to make it. But success in those fields is hard to achieve, and the number of successful practitioners is relatively small. Not only do you have to be good at it, more importantly, you have to have the connections: if you don't know the right people, you will not succeed no matter how good you are.

That means all those people are doing jobs they really don't want to be doing. They settle for working as cooks and waitresses and janitors and used car salesmen because they can't do what they love. And just because they've had to settle for such jobs doesn't mean they should be paid slave wages: everyone should earn a living wage.

But millions of those who are on long-term unemployment aren't that kind of "lazy." They're middle-aged white guys who have lost their jobs because of the recession.

Millions of people, like my brother, can't find a job where they live. To find work they have to abandon their family and friends, take a risk and move to another state to look for a job that they're good at. But they need money to pick and move, money they don't have. Which may mean they have to embarrass themselves by moving back in with mom and dad while their employed friends are bouncing their grandkids on their knee.

Who is going to hire a 54-year-old diabetic heavy equipment operator with knee and back problems caused by an accident on the job? Retraining for a completely new career at that age is really tough, even more so because it costs money they don't have. And if they spend two years at a vo-tech learning a new job in something like computer controlled manufacturing, there's no guarantee whatsoever that any company will hire them, especially when they can hire their grandkids instead.

Unless they know someone who can get them a job, the only option for guys like this is to start back at the bottom in a job at Walmart. And they can't live on a Walmart wage. (Fortunately, because of the Affordable Care Act, most people stuck in this situation now have access to health care so their diabetes won't kill them. Except those people who live in a state run by Republican nitwits who have spent the last five years trying to sabotage the president in every way possible.)

Yes, it's true, if they're not too beat up physically, people like my brother can go to the oil patch in Nowheresville, North Dakota, and apply for a dirty and dangerous job on an oil well, where they live in a crowded and filthy town with no decent apartments, and prostitution and drug use are endemic. Sounds great.

My brother is not unskilled or lazy, but there are a million guys just like him in the same jam. He's a hunter and a fisherman. He'd make a great park ranger, a job he'd love. But so would a million other guys in the same situation.

If you really want to talk about lazy, consider John Boehner and Paul Ryan. All they do is whine about the president, call up rich people and badger them for money, and fly around the country to schmooze with wealthy campaign contributors and the Koch brothers' operatives. And every few weeks they hold another vote to repeal Obamacare.

Does they ever actually do anything?