I feel compelled to throw one more point into the work ethics mix. I think our freedom as individuals is directly tied to our work ethic, and this is the single biggest reason why people who lack in this department grow up bitter.
I also believe that this lack of "work ethic" is one of the greatest issues concerning the North American scene, as these days its considered trendy to be useless or frowned upon to move up in life.
worse still, on top of people fucking their own lives up by perpetuating this fallacy of "fucking over the Man" by being a waist of space, they also grow to resent the rest of the world who is actually working on making a life for themselves.
Case(s) and point(s):
In my poorer days I ate at soup kitchens and missions quite a bit. To some degree I actually liked being there despite the reasons for needing to be. I spent a lot of my day working around the schedules of the soup kitchens. 7:30 am Breakfast at the Salvation Army, 12:30 Lunch at the Shepherds of Good hope, 5 pm supper at Saint Paul's, I had the best places down like clock work.
Walk over, get in a stinky ass line, eat, and repeat. I was never pissed off because I was there, nor did I feel that I was owed more in life. I wish I could say the same for the rest of the people I ran into there. None the less my life at the time was basic and I was pretty content really.
For me there was no misfortune in my life that would have really warranted me being penniless. To be blunt, I was eating in these places because I was lazy. There was lots of options for me to work, from day labor centers, to a ton of places I could get a shit job and make a bit of bank. I just wasn't interested in going out and getting work.
I saw a lot of people down and out on a daily basis, and despite hearing a lot of shit about how bad of a spot people where in, no one ever talked about fixing it. The percentage of people who seemed to accept their current position was quite small. None the less I was pretty happy.
So every day melted into the other and it was actually a pretty chilled existence. Like Orwell stated in DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON (great book by the way) "there is another feeling that is a great consolation in poverty. I believe everyone who has been hard up has experienced it. It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs—and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety."
To me poverty doesn't stem from lack of money. Lack of money is only a symptom of something greater. Unfortunately though our society judges everything solely on the backs of the dollar bill. rich/pour, successful/failure, crust punk/pussy, train hopper/oogle, most of the time the reality of the person is far over looked by simple minds.
This is just as true for people without money as it is for people who have money. This forum is just as full of the whole "oh they have money their fags" as people with money judge those who don't. Its the same fucking shit no matter where you go.
So we call out other groups and shoot down people who have shit, because of course anyone who has anything must have had it handed to them. Meanwhile we are slugging it out at the bottom like real people right? As far as I'm concerned this is the worst attitude an individual could ever have.
The worst part about all this is that despite our own arrogance we still think that it is someone else's responsibility to make us who we want to be. That somehow the government should buy us our freedom. Like we just need to sit around and wait for the world to come to us, and when it doesn't its someone else's fault. Eventually volunteering at the soup kitchen made this painfully clear to me. As over time it became evident just where these attitudes lead most people towards in the end.
I felt a bit bad that I was free loading and well, I wanted more access to the food. So for the next two years I served food there regularly while definitely taking advantage of the access to more eats.
It was amazing how most of the people who came in where pissy about the quality of the free food (actually quite good ), or the rules they had to follow. Most people who where there where pissed off and felt they deserved more from these free, volunteer run, non government services they contribute nothing too. Honestly some of the pickiest mother fuckers out there.
On top of the bitterness there where two common reasons for people eating there, both of which I believe to be a fallacy in the pursuit of freedom. Mental illness of course is a whole other ball game, so lets stick to the sane folks for this one.
1) they didn't want to work for anyone. A lot of these people had issues with authority, and somehow felt that it was better to have nothing than be told what to do, even if it was only on a job site. We'll call this shit pride
2) the sense of self entitlement was ridiculous. Even more prevalent than not wanting to be told what to do, people felt there position in life was not their doing, but because others have treated them poorly, or they didn't get what they deserve.
Now I get that shit happens in life and we get dealt bad hands at times. The thing is at the end of the day we are the only ones who decide how to deal with what comes at us. People want to be free but wont accept responsibility for their place . Time after time I saw this in the people who where coming in.
As someone who was pretty much in the same boat, I didn't have issue with the fact people where there, but I was turned off by the fact that most didn't take responsibility for themselves. The ones who did where happy as shit day in and day out, but you could tell the people who couldn't accept responsibility for themselves by their anger.
These attitudes also run rampant with the north american traveling scene, especially among so called train hoppers. This is magnified with this whole bullshit Anarchist anti civ business, which is the biggest contradiction out there.
Ridding trains yet ranting on capitalism. The railroad being one of the biggest fucking capitalistic industries the continent has ever produced. Not to mention its capitalism's excess that fuels a free loading society. Nothing against the lifestyle, just the people who bitch about the things that make their choice lifestyle a reality... weak as fuck in my eyes.
It blows my mind how free people want to be, yet expect the fucking government to hand out their happiness. Like do people not see the massive fucking contradiction in it all?
If your sitting around expecting others to give you shit, your about as far from freedom as you can get. Yet somehow the war drum beats to these false notions every fucking day.
Again if you don't want to be part of a system and your happy with what that brings, then by all means go for it. Having a good work ethic doesn't mean you have to work for a system, it just means you gotta be willing to roll with the punches in order to have the life of your choosing.
I find it sad when I hear kids go on about this Capitalism bullshit and how they don't want to work for the man..Like if they do its just some kind of machine sucking the life from them.
The system may be set up for just this, but what they don't realize is they are actually fucking themselves by going against everything just for the principal.
Fuck the man! I agree whole heatedly. That being said though, even if the system is set up to take advantage of us, even if money is a complete illusion (which it is, just think how the same piece of paper has different values depending on what number it has on it...same paper different number), the thing is at the end of the day it isn't about the man or someone else making money off of you. Its about yourself and your freedom to do with your life what you want.
So what if the guy your working for is making more money off of your back than your getting. By avoiding that work you also give up on all the opportunities that money could afford you. People seem more driven to keep others from succeeding off of them, then by making their own life rich and full.
There are certain undeniable truths about this world and no amount of going against them with change that. So at the end of the day your not fighting anyone but yourself. If you think your going to change the world by Dumpstering and not making money, your seriously delusional. Again if you chose to live that way its all good, just don't turn around and be pist when you don't have anything.
I used to get flack for working and making money from a large potion of the train hopping community. But you know what, when Im sitting on a roof top in the deserts of India smoking opium and hash, looking out over the vastness and experience everything that comes with it, its really hard to buy into this bullshit, or give a fuck what some spanger train hopper thinks freedom should be.
Yet despite the obvious benefits to ones self a good work ethic brings, people still get Romanticized by this whole angry fuck the world business. I say fuck the worldtoo, but don't fuck yourself, which is just what people are doing.
This stands just as true for making money as it does for living a life void of money. Both require a good work ethic to get ahead and be successful The point here is only you can make your life what you want it to be. At the end of the day avoiding things just because its part of a "system" or because someone else profits more, is idiotic in my eyes.
The real issue in all of this is that kids look up to skids who perpetuate this false ideal of freedom. And because of that they are doomed towards an angry wasted life.
True freedom comes at a price, things on this earth cost time, money or both either way both require effort. If your pissed about your lot in life and doing nothing about it except bitch, I'd say you have a pout work ethic, and I'd be even bolder to predict your going nowhere and may as well be happy about it.
Worse still, the idea of avoiding making a life for yourself because part of it includes working in a system is pure fucking poison. Besides if you really want to take it down you need to get to a place where you can actually make things happen. Being a crust punk is about as far from making this happen on a mass level as it gets.
You can still take from a system without being a slave to it. Think of yourself as a cancer cell, drifting undetected throughout the body. You may go with the flow, you may act like one of the heard, but at the end of the day your a fucking wolf on the prowl.
Unfortunately for me I got a taste for traveling abroad and I cant stop. Planes cost money, everything costs money, I have no choice but to work in order to buy that ticket so I can really fuck off for a while. That's the reality, if I want to do things I gotta to do what it takes to make it happen. In this case that means making money and working my ass off from time to time. I know why I work when I do and I don't give a shit if it supports some system or not. There is no fucking way I'd ever give up going to say India in order to fight some political system...
All that to say, our work ethic is the only thing that stands between our dreams and our nightmares. If we want to truly be free, we need to live our life based on what will get us to where we want to be, not based on a shity political ideology.
Nazi Socialists like to use the term "work makes free" as a way to get the heard to work hard for the system. Even if your against the system this still rings true, you just need to use it for the right reasons. Perspective is everything.
If your content having nothing then its all fine and good. just don't turn around and blame others for why your where you are. Freedom is all responsibility for ones own actions. You want shit out of life, you gotta take it.