It was humiliating and embarrassing and a whole bunch of other negative stuff, but, again, people said it “built character”

You know, my grandson is working at McDonalds these days. And he sought the job out and got it by himself. And I guess I think it’s good that he’s shown that type of initiative and decided to officially enter the human race. He’s only 15 so I feel he’s a little young to get too involved and should make sure school stays the priority with him. Remember my Dad telling me when I was a young guy that it was his job to work to earn money to support the family and it was my job to go to school and do well – there’d be lots of time for work when I finished school. Now my Dad was no namby-pamby….and he wanted me to work in the summers, but other than that, he wanted me to concentrate on school.

Now, I was lucky when I was a young guy because I got to be okay at playing the bass guitar and as long as I had a band of some sort going, I had money and didn’t really need to “work” for a living. But there were certainly gaps in the bands, and then I would have to get a real job if I wanted to have any type of social life and just simply have some control over the way things were going. And it seemed I had a whole bunch of seriously rotten jobs whenever I did enter the work force…I mean, I shovelled various kinds of shit, dug ditches, poured cement, carried huge whacks of supplies around a bunch of different construction sites, painted window frames for a couple of months straight, painted barns, cleaned crap-plugged toilets, mopped floors and did a quite a few other really nasty things when I was growing up….

Back in those olden days, there was a real and serious belief that doing this sort of work built something that everyone called character. And I have told people that if this is true, then I have accumulated huge, huge amounts of character over the years. And I think that by building character folks sort of meant that you were developing a certain type of mental toughness that prepared you for actual life – which, of course, was filled with all sorts of unpleasant situations where you would need at least a modicum of mental toughness. I should say at this point in this piece of writing that this totally and absolutely failed with me. I have dealt with a variety of mental health issues in my life mostly stemming from the fact I’m way too sensitive to just about everything that goes on around me. And that can make for a difficult life’s journey for sure.

But, back to my 15-year-old grandson and his job at McDonalds. It got me wondering if kids today – teenage kids – ever do any really back-breaking, gut-wrenching, manual, menial labour….or do they all work at fast food restaurants and big box stories and places like that. I don’t know – does running a French fry machine or flipping burgers build character? Does it build that same type of mental toughness? I think maybe it does. I know for a fact that I’d need to be mentally tough to wear a hair net and run a fry machine for any length of time. My grandson already knows he doesn’t want to make a career out of flipping burgers and I suppose that’s forward progress.

And I don’t know if confronting young people with a constant array of tasks intended to “build character” is a good thing or not. Just like when I was a kid, I wasn’t very athletic. As a result, I usually got picked last for most sports teams – or I didn’t get picked at all because nobody wanted me on their team. It was humiliating and embarrassing and a whole bunch of other negative stuff, but, again, people said it “built character”…and in some people, I suppose it might. But in other people, like me, it can really work to crush the spirit out of you and make you feel like life’s biggest loser. And that’s not a positive thing at any point.

Anyway, I have survived almost to the age of seventy, so maybe all the crap I did as a young guy, and not getting picked for teams, did actually somehow make me mentally tougher…don’t really know. But I do know we’d have way less mental illness and addiction and other bad stuff if only the world was a kinder, gentler place that cherished all life for its very preciousness……