Employment is mine!

I’ve got a job. I’ve got a job and I’m pretty happy about it too.

Since losing my last job (Now where did I put that thing?) I was quite confident that I would be OK. I always am. In strange and unexpected ways I find myself being met with opportunities. Like being offered food it is normally just a matter of saying, “Yes, please.” However I know this isn’t everyone’s experience. I have quite a few friends who are unemployed, have been for some time.

Why me and not them? A readily available answer is nepotism. It is as simple and complex as that. In exploring social networks work, the resultant opportunities, and how they come to be there are two traditional, boring, explanations. I’m not particularly interested in those. I don’t think that it is exclusively the power of social institutions that prop people up or keep them down. Nor do I think it is because some people work hard and others don’t. I think both of these explanations are valid to a degree, more or less depending on circumstance.

The prevalence of these two explanations (blame society vs. blame the individual) is because they are easily understood. The reality of course is that to try to separate background from individual choice is an artificial and naïve division. The silent and omnipresent voice of culture is always with us. Rather it is both.

I was having a discussion with my brother the other day about the nature of sexism and how it manifests in our lives. As the conversation carried on he said “…it’s one of those things that you’ll discover inside yourself for the rest of your life.” That is the God’s honest truth right there.

Through the continued observation of self I’ve been able to more and more clearly suss out what is mine and what is others. More importantly I’ve been able to see more and more clearly that while there are a great many injustices in the world that I would happily rail against, it is more useful to look out how I contribute to those things in my own life.

Many of the failures of idealistic movements in history can probably be attributed to a lack of self-awareness. It’s so much easier to blame someone else as being “the problem,” rather than looking around for how to be a solution.

With that I’ll leave you with a song that’s been stuck in my head. If only I could get it out. I know I’ve got pliers around here somewhere.