At 11:14 AM -0700 on 7/13/99, Rob Cozens wrote:
>A true story:
>
>Yesterday my wife & I decided to take a day off from the 110+ (F) Anderson
>Valley foothills for the 70+ coast between Mendocino and Westport, CA. We
>spent many hours wave and tidepool watching.
>
>At the last spot we stopped we were sitting on a cliff above an inlet
>watching a Canadian goose, a sunning seal, and a colony of cliff swallows.
>As I looked down at my feet I noticed a small berry plant with some fruit
>beginning to ripen. I was tempted to pick a berry and eat it; but I
>thought of Anthony and knew he wouldn't want me working on my day off :{`).
Well, if you want to work on your day off... that's your choice. The real
objection might of been if those were someone else's berries. But if they
did not mind, then pick the dang berry. Of course, unless you know for a
fact htat those berries were not poison, I would not suggest it :)
>
>Picking berries when one is hungry isn't work; it's satisfying a basic need.
I think the physicists would quite agree with me that that it is work.
>
>Picking berries for the taste isn't work; it's enjoying the boundty of nature.
So, you enjoy your work. Who says you can't?
>
>Picking berries for minimum wage while trying to raise a family without
>health insurance and adequate social services in a society where corporate
>CEO's are paid 10s or 100s of millions of $ isn't work: it's the closest
>thing to slavery modern economic societies have to offer. (In fact it's
>worse than salvery: most slave owners {at least in pre Civil War Southern
>US} acknowledged some responsibility for the feeding and medical care of
>their slaves.)
Yeh. You forgot one thing in your equating the South's slaves with picking
berries. You chose to pick berries. The slaves were forced to work. And
your life, even with minimum wage, is _far_ better than that of slaves.
If you don't want to pick berries, then don't. If that is all you are
qualified for, well, don't expect someone to employ you to program. Try
garbage collecting. They get paid quite well (certainly no minimum-wage job
there!).
PS: Would you be happier if capitalism had never existed?
