I’m an analytical soul, equally cursed and blessed.
It makes me a decent academic and a thoughtful partner and friend, but if you’re after a bit of banter or a fun, carefree night on the town, count me out. I’ll tag along, sure. But I won’t contribute a damn thing.
Speaking of a fun night out, America is my current obsession; a rabbit hole of endless analysis. At some point, I’ll stop—for my own happiness, if nothing else.
I’m not immune to its impulses, either. The keeping up with the Joneses, the primal drive for upward mobility. I have countless fears and insecurities about my career and success—or lack thereof. Still, I count myself as fortunate to have stepped out of the rat race. To have realized that there’s so much more to being happy and successful than an amorphous job title and an annual raise with uncompensated hours of additional responsibilities.
Some people, though, really are suited to the rat race.
When I was 18, I worked as a barista. It wasn’t a bad job. But I will never forget the trainer, I’ll call him Sean, who—in addition to calling me a “PMS-y woman” during training—one day proclaimed, “I have the greatest job in the world.”
Really? You can find the greatest job in the world at the corner of 28th Street and the East Beltline, nestled in a mass of suburban sprawl? Working at a drive-thru for a dollar over minimum wage? For a socially inept man baby, two years older than you, who was handed the keys to the store by his parents? The guy who wiped snot from his own nose on the store manager’s hand?
I digress.
Clearly, the greatest job in the world is less about the job, and more about management. It’s the sort of thing they love to hear. It’s great for your annual review. And it conveniently shields you from any expectations of actually having to follow through and do any of the work that comes with the greatest job in the world yourself.
Can-do attitude, check. Enthusiasm, check. Sit back in the glow of management’s approval while everyone else gets their hands dirty for you (mind the snot), check.
A few years later, I was working in Flint. I saw a headline out of Detroit one day about a man, real name James, who commuted hours to work everyday through a combination of walking extreme distances, and cobbled together buslines. And he had been doing it for years.
You would think, or I would think, it was just the sort of exposé to spark outrage at what Slate magazine described as “America’s worst transit system,” and its underlying structural racism. Maybe some reasonable questions might be asked of James’ employer. After a decade working for a place that felt like “family” and never missing a day, why was he unable to afford a new car? After all, doesn’t family take care of and look out for one another? Or in this case, did it mean that James’ boss wiped snot on him, too?
Locally, the story exposed the unflagging persistence (and impotence) of white benevolence. Impressed by James’ can-do attitude, people left comments about how they wished their employees took their work as seriously as this Detroiter. James. The man who walked 10 miles to work every day, 10 miles home. A college student started a GoFundMe, the balm to all America’s for-profit ills, and a suburban Ford dealership donated a car. James had earned it. He had proven himself worthy.
This is an extreme case. But whether you’re Sean the coffee shop trainer, or James “the walking man,” aren’t we all doing sort of the same thing? Hoping that at some point, someone who’s “made it” will recognize us trying to make it, too? That they’ll stop their car while we’re walking through the snow and give us a lift toward that promotion—that car, that grant, that degree?
Where does that leave the rest of us? Those of us less disingenuous than Sean, but less driven (less hopeful?) than James? Where does that leave other Detroiters, the tens of thousands without cars, waiting on a lift? Not everyone can be James, “the walking man,” after all. Can you imagine? Fifty thousand donated Fords, fifty thousand GoFundMe accounts set up by white college kids? In the Arsenal of Democracy, I think many would settle for regional leaders and voters getting their act together and setting up a functioning transit system.
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