ISBN 978-1-60264-112-9, softcover, $14.95, 224 pages
Employment is required to earn money, providing necessities and creature comforts. This truth stands in stark contrast to the lie of the American dream that the pursuit of money equals the pursuit of happiness. That’s a deal with the devil.
Our humanity has been sacrificed on the altar of greed. We have been reduced to mere resources, existing only to serve the elite corporate “person.” The once noble employment is now exploitation.
And while the reality of employment is different for those with college degrees and the rest of us, the conflicts are not between blue-collar and white, or any other alleged duality.
Our real work, therefore, is not labor devoted to jobs and careers but rather coming to terms with the complexities of daily life. These conflicts are between and among those who confuse the use of force with having power over us, those who have it and those who want it, those who don’t have it, and those wanting nothing to do with it.
The big lie is that there’s more to life than working and making money. There’s only life. Are you going to live it on your terms, or theirs?
FROM THE AUTHOR:
“I’m a working man with no college education, living in national obscurity in the Blue Ridge Mountains of southwest Virginia, content to be a salmon swimming upstream. The bears in this country have been taking bites out of my ass, sometimes small ones, often big, painful chunks. As I write this, you’ll see, I have a history of having worked at some fifty-plus companies in forty-one years. Now that’s a dubious honor at best, but it does mean I have more actual experience than both the average person and the so-called experts when it comes to finding, losing, and re-finding employment in those areas in which a college degree is not a specific requirement.
I really don’t know that much about everything. Two things, however, are absolutes: People make choices. Actions have consequences. After that, all bets are off and your guess is as good as mine. So perhaps “Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow you die” is indeed our entire lot in life. I’m a loss, however, to understand why that involves being cruel to each other.”
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