Trump is talking about bringing jobs back to America, but it's not the kind of jobs our college kids want. This country has pushed college education so hard for the last 15 years that nobody, and I mean NOBODY under the age of 30 believes it's possible to make a decent living by strapping up work boots for 40-60 hours a week.
Dude.
You can't fit a hardhat over your casual beanie. Besides, the colors might clash.
You can't hold a latte while wearing work gloves.
Safety glasses won't fit over your lensless frames.
There was a time when I advocated for mandatory two-year military service or a job that involved labor for every man coming out of high school.
When I was growing up I worked in a hayfield. I worked for a roofing company. I worked (briefly) at a glove manufacturing plant. I sold cars. I sold insurance. I sold advertising. I delivered auto parts. I worked at Otasco and a clothing store and Pizza Hut. I figured out ways to survive and I did things I didn't want to do.
By the time I had my first child, I'd worked my way up from delivering furniture to running accounts to running the store to running a district to working for the corporate office as a fixer. Went around the country starting new stores, hiring new staff and fixing problems. But I wanted more. Started my own store using what I'd learned and turned it into a money-printing machine. But the work was killing me. 16 hour days, six days a week. Could never leave. I'd been doing it five years and had an assistant manager who'd been with me for four of them. I never took an off day and never took vacation. One day I finally decided I needed a break. Didn't go in and was going to play golf. Drove past the store 30 minutes after it was supposed to be open. None of the lights were on. So I pulled in there and went inside. My assistant manager, three of my drivers and my brother-in-law were in the back. They'd gone the night before to the video store, rented several dozen porn movies and had rigged up every VCR we had in the store to make copies of the pornos, which I then discovered my drivers had been taking and selling during their daily scheduled runs. Stayed up all night copying porno and left the store closed. But I digress.
I later sold that store. Spent a year doing nothing but spending time with my kid and tried to figure out what I wanted to do next. Had a friend who was making a good living "cruising timber" and he got me on at the plant where he worked. But they had a rule. Before I could "cruise timber" I had to learn all the aspects of the business in a hands on manner. So I had to change the blades on the chippers, run with the maintenance crews. I worked the night shift. Then I had to actually run the chipper for a month or so. One night at 2 a.m. while I was eating a cold baloney sandwich while sitting on the tailgate of my truck during my "lunch hour" I decided to go back to college. I quit the lumber mill the next day, eight months shy of possibly getting to cruise some timber. Unrelated, but the guy I know who worked there was later killed in the woods by a falling tree. So.
I'd gone to college before, treated it as a joke, acted a fool and wasted a scholarship. When I went back it meant something. I tried. I cared.
Long diatribe there, but what I'm trying to say is that these marshmallow snowflakes have never learned to survive like I had to. They've been gifted things their entire lives. They don't know what it means to truly suffer. Suffering isn't Starbucks being out of pumpkin spice. Suffering is when there are eight days left in the month and you've got five dollars to your name and no food in the fridge. I've been there. I've done that. I've eaten a spoonful of peanut butter because that's all I could afford that day.
And what's interesting to me about that is that my grandfather (both of them) thought
I was soft. Because i'd never watched my friends die in a war on foreign soil. I'd never had food rationed. I'd never stood in lines during the depression just to find something, anything that could feed my family for one more day.
tl;dr version?
Fuck those marshmallow wussies.
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