What Do You Wanna Be When/If You Grow Up?
By Mickey Z.
26 December, 2013
World News Trust
Photo credit: Mickey Z.
“I always resented all the years, the hours, the minutes I gave them as a working stiff, it actually hurt my head, my insides, it made me dizzy and a bit crazy -- I couldn’t understand the murdering of my years.” - Bukowski
In the United States, the topic of work infiltrates many aspects of our life. Consider the most common question we’re asked from the time we’re old enough to comprehend it: What do you wanna be when you grow up?
The unspoken assumption in this ridiculous question, of course, is that the child on the receiving end is not quite “something” or “someone” now... but s/he will be something when s/he spends 8-10 hours a day in a cubicle crunching numbers under artificial light to the sound of Muzak and can finally answer this new question: So, what do you do for a living?
When asking a child what they “wanna be” when they “grow up,” imagine how you’d react if that kid said something like: actuary or insurance salesperson or elevator repairman or director of human resources or doorman or administrative assistant or receptionist at the local orthodontics office. Seriously, has any kid anywhere ever yearned for a life in middle management?
More urgently, if we must ask this patronizing question, let’s at least help create a culture in which their “childlike” dreams may actually come true. Which leads me to another, even more ominous angle on all this…
The Murdering of Our Future
As the rain forests vanish, oceans acidify, temperatures rise, and extinctions accelerate, we adults should stop asking young children about their future and instead start fighting to insure they have one.
Wake-Up Call: The future will contain what we put into it now.
Translation: The earthlings that come after us won’t be even remotely impressed with our feeble gestures, clever memes, and endless excuses if they -- in the future -- have no clean air to breathe, no clean water to use, and are stuck on a toxic, virtually uninhabitable police state of a planet.
They’ll probably just wanna ask us: Why the fuck didn’t you do more to stop everything from being consumed or poisoned or destroyed?
Make no mistake, comrades, you will be questioned about what you did during this momentous period of human struggle -- and the best answer just may be:
I did my part. I lived and breathed my part, 24/7, in the name of all earthlings.
The future, as always, remains unwritten.
#shifthappens
Note: To continue conversations like this, come see Mickey Z. in person on Jan. 11 at Bluestockings Bookstore in NYC.
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Mickey Z. is the author of 11 books, most recently the novel Darker Shade of Green. Until the laws are changed or the power runs out, he can be found on a couple of obscure websites called Facebook and Twitter. Anyone wishing to support his activist efforts can do so by making a donation here.
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