The President’s Blog

Sue and I had a wonderful time visiting with family on the Carolina coast this July.  From my 91 year old mom to the newest 1 year old great-grandchild, there was a lot energy on the beach and in the houses over the week.

My nieces and nephews started an interesting conversation one night by describing their first jobs.  Several of the women had done baby-sitting and some of the men had worked for their dads, but the conversation led me to think about their reactions and responses to the jobs we described.

My first paid job was picking cotton in South Carolina.  It paid 2 cents a pound and I, along with other neighborhood boys, would usually only spend a week picking since it wasn’t really our livelihood.  We would be lucky to earn 10-12 dollars over the course of a week, picking cotton for 8 hours a day in 90 degree heat.  Up and down the rows we would go trying our best to keep up with the black men and women who worked so hard at this to get money to feed their families.

It was brutal, hard, dirty work which left you exhausted from bending over and dragging a burlap bag along with you all day.  Interestingly enough, the job that my young relatives chose as the most difficult was not the hard labor of picking cotton, but working at KFC which one niece did when she was in high school.  The uniform was bad and the smell of chicken in your hair after work was too much to bear.

On the long ride home, as I thought about the week and about that particular conversation, I realized that my younger relatives had no frame of reference for understanding hard, physical labor.  They have never done any hard, physical labor in their very privileged world.  I am glad for them, but wonder about the implications of this for future generations.