Thursday, October 4, 2012

Makers and Takers in Southwestern Virginia, Part II

First, please read: http://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2012/10/makers-and-takers-in-southwestern.html. If you've already read it and wondered, "Why bring the neighborhood stereotypes into it?", there was a reason: That bad old stereotype of AppaLAYshia was based on the belief that everybody in the Appalachian Mountains is on the take--that all we "hillbillies" ever do is fake disabilities and/or abandon our families to pursue a welfare-cheating, whisky-brewing, marijuana-growing lifestyle. To the extent that people believed this, they had valid reasons to despise "hillbillies." Most of us, of course, despise that kind of people too.

At the same time, some of us want people like that to exist. Maybe we consciously feel a need to be able to look down on somebody. Maybe we're unconsciously trying to recapture the "high" we once felt about giving something to someone who had less. Maybe we're not comfortable thinking about the possibility that some people genuinely care more about maintaining their own "maker" lifestyle, or even rebuilding a local "maker" economy, than about the extra goodies they might be able to buy if they became welfare "takers."

Some of us are in the less antisocial, employable or formerly employable, class of "takers"--the ones who have in fact done jobs, conscientiously, as long as some large bureaucracy or corporation was telling them exactly what to do for a certain number of hours--and aren't altogether comfortable with the reality that "makers" exist.

I was born a "maker." I think everyone should read Dorothy Sayers' Mind of the Maker. At the same time that this classic book explains Christian beliefs about God, it also does an excellent job of explaining how introverts think. The term "work" can of course include things other people pay us by the hour to do, but it goes beyond that. Work is what we know from infancy that we're in this world to do. Work is how we relate to other people, how we live, how we think, and what we are. We must obviously stop doing the actual writing or building or experimenting or whatever other activity is associated with our work, at times, but we never stop being writers, builders, scientists, or whatever; if we did we wouldn't be our conscious selves, and many of us would see no reason to keep breathing.

I allocate very little time each day to anything that's not productive work; after a minimal amount of home and body maintenance (work), there's writing, reading, transcription, filing, knitting, gardening, and various crafts and odd jobs. I take books to the laundromat. I knit during conversations. I would have time for social gatherings and cultural events if I were getting paid to write about them--but I'm not, so I stay home and do things that are more immediately useful. I choose to do things that are both worth doing for their own sake, and marketable to people who pay me for doing them. This is a very satisfying lifestyle but it leaves no time, energy, or money to waste on passive "entertainment."

So I've actually become accustomed to the idea that employed or formerly employed "takers" don't like to admit that I do any work at all. But it's worse than just a personal disagreement about whether individuals can or cannot afford to be full-time creative "makers." When a "taker" (or slave) mentality really becomes entrenched in a community, we do start to see the idea that the whole community is just a bunch of poor, pathetic leeches who can't be expected to take any initiative or responsibility, to handle anything for or among themselves. To the extent that people adopt the idea that "we," as private citizens, seniors, relatively less wealthy Americans, etc., are a wage-slave-or-welfare class who can only be said to "work" when employed by the employer class, AppaLAYshia becomes real.

What does AppaLAYshia look like, in the real world? Mercifully, there's not enough of it--yet--to affect the look of a whole landscape very much. It's a conversation. It sounds like this:

"I must have caught that virus that lady was complaining about having at that dinner party. I have been feeling too low and lazy to get up and wash the dishes, mop the floor, or take out the garbage, much less fix the leak in my bathroom."

"I'm sorry you've been under the weather. Since you just got a pension cheque that is at least four times the amount it would take to cover the reasonable cost of living where you do, there's no need for your house to show that you've been ill. For $50 I'll clean up your house, and for another $50 plus the cost of materials Adayahi will look at your bathroom."

"Highway robbery! I never thought I would live to see the day when young people would expect money for helping a poor old retired government worker. Why don't you get a real job if you need money so much. Well, I'll get by, I suppose. I don't even notice any smell...By the way I'm driving to a concert in Asheville, if you want to come along."

There is a total absence of any sense that paying local people to do useful work would be a more neighborly use of that generous pension than giving the money to an out-of-state band. Well, actually this individual could easily afford to do both, but the problem is that he's actually absorbed the idea that paying his neighbors to work is a bad thing.

If and whenever a whole town sank into this horrible way of thinking, then AppaLAYshia would be a real place...an entire community of full-time "takers" with no "makers." And the rest of the nation would have every right to despise it, loathe it, even hate it.

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