You Gotta Have a Job

I learned this in High School, and I learned it good! If you didn't have a job, you were nobody.

A job was how you made money - but more importantly, it made you like everyone else. Everyone else that mattered.

There was a long history behind this attitude, the history of Capitalism. That divided people into two types - the people that had money, and used it to make more money - and the workers they employed their factories.

In America however, Most people were farmers, and lived in the country. And stayed away from the cities, where immigrants worked in the factories and the railroads.

This division of labor broke down under the impact of a series of wars - the American Civil War, WWI, and WWII. And one more thing - the Depression, that was not a war, but in many ways, was worse than one.

WWII resulted in an affluent middle class, where everyone had a job - and it was easy to go to college, and get an even better job.

I was one of those people, with a degree in Electronic Engineering (U of Illinois,1959).

Something else appeared - the Office, a strange institution that employed a lot of people, who didn't do much, but enforced conformity rigorously!

This produced another kind of person, hard to describe, who did not really exist, but did have a job.