The change is in the air – along with the threat of snow.
Few things last in this life time more than for a few years
these days or maybe never lasted. I had pictures of the world in my head from
the post World War II era growing up of great hope and promise. I have pictures
of my family moving into the old house on the hill, all of them thinking that
the world had become renewed and that the boundless future lay ahead.
Perhaps it did, for the brick layers, and those who build
their future piece by piece – a conservative idea I didn’t always believe when
I grew up in the 1960s and assumed that we could depend on Big Brother to
protect us, to provide us with all those necessities the greedy of the Post
Civil War denied – But godfathers and robber barons simply change their tactics
and operate behind the scenes, pulling levers like The Wizard of Oz, and
deluding the masses of people into believing that the future is bright when it is
only bright for those who rise to the top of the froth.
But capitalism, criminal or legal, elevates very few, and as
Thoreau pointed out, most of us live our lives in quiet desperation, either
accepting our fate as cogs in the wheel of this machine or defying it, and
becoming frustrated by it, and eventually crushed by it.
Some enjoy the benefits of power for a while, and then fall
out of favor, or find their no longer needed, and get cast aside, desperate to
find some new venue upon which to start their climb (or slide – depending on
your point of view) into a new pyramid of power.
This isn’t just political or criminal, it is life.
I’ve been through so many changes of jobs in my life that I
have seen the petty power structures rise and fall, mini-Roman Empires to which
the small cling to for sense of worth.
Somehow in my life, I have been immune to these – either
because I had positioned myself rightly as indispensable or because of sheer
luck.
As a baker in the 1980s and early 1990, I saw my shop sold a
dozen times – each time watching those who grooved closest to the new boss,
building a relationship with the new boss, only to lose status as the next boss
sought out his own cronies he or she could trust.
I was always above the fray, because people didn’t mess with
quality bakers back then. these days, machines have made me history, and I am
referred to as “a stick man” making me realize just how Mark Twain felt after
training to become a river boat pilot only to have the end of the Civil War
destroy that industry. Something similar is happening in the news industry in
my time but it matters less to me because I am at the end of a career not at
the beginning as Twain was back then.
But the concept remains the same.
Survival depends upon personal power, ability to transcend
change – not just dependability. (The most essential cog can be replaced in any
machine I learned long ago.) But somehow, you need to believe in yourself to
such an extent that your power does not rely on some higher power (expect perhaps
the highest power) and that what you do matters more than what recognition you
get.
This is a long view because of the ups and downs that it
entails and the eventual belief that in the end what you do will make a
difference and bring about what you want.
The art world is littered with people who gave up their
dreams, settling for less or moving onto something else because the road to
what they was as success got too hard.
I remember a friend who came to visit me in the Garfield
Dunkin donuts commenting that I was better that what she saw, that I ought to
have another more respectable job.
I quoted Jackson Browne’s “Running on Empty,” and said, “Try
not to confuse what you do with what you do to survive.”
Sometimes, if you’re lucky, these are the same at the same
time. Most often they aren’t. But at every moment of my life, what I do to
survive matters as much as what I aspire to do. And although sometimes, this is
a huge struggle, it is the only way I can survive the ups and downs and changes
of power that go on around me. I work for a boss, but deep down inside me, I
work hard at whatever I am doing because it is the only real way to survive.
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