I agree with this so much. Including how much of an impact one person can make just through day to day interactions. I had a rebbe in yeshiva who used to give a regular speech about how smiling at someone can change their lives. This speech really stuck with me and I started trying to smile at everyone when I said hello. A few months later someone told me that the fact that I smiled at them every day made yeshiva bareable for them (at the time I had no idea this person was unhappy, he hid it well).
Just one more story for me to pontificate in your comments section ;). When I visited Russia with my parents we went to a restaurant and ordered food, and afterwards we met with my parents’ friends and told them that the service was amazing. They said that it’s very unusual in Moscow and they’d like to go see it. When we went back with them they were rude to the waiters (one woman actually called someone “boy” who looked around the same age as my dad) and the service was shocking. The people we went with told us they were surprised and disappointed after the review we had given...
The "only a waitress" comments by the young person are the sort of thing it would never have occurred to me to say when I was a young activist. I may have had the good fortune to come into the kind of left-wing political milieu in which it was instilled in us that if we were serious about our politics we had to respect and care about people like the cleaners and the catering workers in the student union. Then again, perhaps there really has been a more general decline in interest in class politics in younger activist milieux over the past 45 years.
I knew your comments would be interesting. It’s why I was really shocked by the conversation - how can one be “progressive” if one is denigrating workers? Is this how the new left wing activists think?
Modern “progressive” identity politics, however, doesn’t seem to have any consideration of class. It’s why I feel left behind by the left. This is not something I recognise or embrace.
I remember reading *Grit* by Angela Duckworth - a self-help book about cultivating resilience - and in the section on finding purpose it talked about how someone could find meaning in something as 'menial' as cleaning toilets/being a janitor. That you could make an impact to other people and society in many imperceptible ways. I was working as a dish hand at the time, and during a moment of mental crisis it made the work tolerable.
I know exactly what you mean. Everything is important - my dishes are clean at the restaurant because you had been careful with your job, and that’s something I should really value. My husband had a stint as a dish hand too, while he was a student.
These “menial” jobs make everyone’s life more comfortable. I do wonder too (re Japanese attitudes) whether it is a coincidence that きれい (kirei) means both “beautiful” and “clean”. I have help with housecleaning through the NDIS, because I have huge issues bending and picking things up off the floor. I certainly do not take the work of the people who help me for granted, as I tell them often. It makes my life safer (they get stuff off the floor) and so much more pleasant.
People can be rude to front-line service providers for a range of reasons. Those of us who work in teaching jobs in higher education are also service providers, but the power dynamics of our workplaces mean that the rudeness of the "customers" comes out in the anonymous comments in the end of trimester evaluations.
That’s opening a whole can of worms! Sometimes students have fair reasons to complain. Sometimes - the feedback is just mean (unduly personal), or relates to things I can’t control (the university IT system). I think the anonymity and online nature of it has given rise to nastier and more polarised comments.
Yes. I had one comment in my most recent teaching evaluation survey that proposed that the tutorials be held in smaller rooms that were configured to allow more interaction between students, rather than being held in lecture theatres. I posted an announcement to the students that I had seen this suggestion, and that I completely agreed with it, but that the allocation of teaching rooms by the timetabling office was beyond the control of anybody involved in teaching the course.
I think one thing that students deserve to be better informed about as part of their transition from school to university (but which university managements won't be in a hurry to tell them about) is that the typical Australian university is a larger and more complex organisation than anything they have previously encountered, and that there are consequences of this in terms of how decisions are made, and by whom, on matters that affect them.
This is lovely, Katy, and so true. I think changing the world is a small, granular enterprise, person by person. I resolved during the pandemic that I would stop worrying about things I can’t change or control and instead focus on the people and the work right in front of me. It’s a lot harder than talking but much more rewarding!
Yes. Sometimes my children get anxious about all the things in the world - but no point worrying about things they can’t change. And likewise, in the pandemic, I tried to focus on small moments of joy… all we could do, really.
I agree with all of that, but I do find it amazing that an "activist", most of whom have literally the most broken models of the world I've ever encountered, and only rarely cost society less than they spend (i.e. are a net cost to society because they certainly are not making anything better, this is almost impossible if one has basically ,no idea how the world works) could look down on someone who who was doing an honest job for a living.
Well this is the whole thing. If you’re an activist, you get to say what’s needed to make the world better and if others don’t do it, or it doesn’t work, it’s clearly because other people are wrong and fallible and evil, not because your premises are wrong.
The reason an honest job is honest is precisely because it’s reality tested, something I keep thinking about. It has real outputs where you can measure the quality of your work in real time. It produces something of immediate worth.
I was not quite as reactionary 10 years ago but living in Europe has made me really almost pathologically suspicious of anyone who thinks they know better than other people what those people need or want.
I think every activist - left or right, more or less radical - has a predisposition towards noticing what is wrong with society and the world, what is not working, and thus calling out the inequities and iniquities we see in the belief that these can be fixed through consciously political action. This is not a problem in itself - far from it. When it becomes a problem is when people get into the mindset of *only* noticing what is wrong with society and the world, thinking that everything is terrible, and either lapsing into despair or diving into the kind of revolutionism that wants to denounce everyone and smash everything.
A mature political outlook, and a mature outlook on what politics can and can't achieve, requires developing the ability to also notice what is good or at least satisfactory about society and the world, and being able to discern the difference between those things that really are in need of some kind of radical change, and those where the best outcomes will be achieved by incremental reform, or by simply managing competently what already exists, or by letting people carry on with their freely chosen activities from which benefits flow to the rest of us.
A certain kind of political activist is like the house visitor of the pre-digital area who would refuse to be told by the household that they had learned through experience that the TV reception was the best that they could get, and who would insist on pissfarting about with the antenna and the tuning knobs in a way that always irretrievably ruined whatever quality of reception the household had painstakingly achieved.
Some activists are not so much about doing good, as about being seen to be doing good, if that makes sense. They’re the ones I don’t like (and I have seen them on both sides of politics and in other contexts). They will attack you viciously if you point out that there are any problems with what they do - they’re not interested in the reality but the appearance - and they don’t want their pristine self-image to be tarnished. Frankly, I tend to think now that they’ve got serious personality disorders, having read a bit about these in the last few years.
These are the kind of people who freak me out in any activist group: the righteous zealots. In extremes, they will kill for the greater good of society, because any problem is not theirs, it’s a problem with society for not conforming to their ideals. And this is not a left-right thing - they’ll adapt to whatever the current zeitgeist favours.
In my cycling trips and other travels that have taken me up country over the past four years I have noticed a lot of short-staffing of cafes, restaurants, pubs and shops, especially in smaller towns. I have been conscious of larger phenomena such as economic conditions, and the pandemic and responses to it, that would have contributed to it, and of course I always remember that the front-line person at the counter has no control over such factors, and usually doesn't make decisions about cafe staffing, house policies, etc.
I agree with this so much. Including how much of an impact one person can make just through day to day interactions. I had a rebbe in yeshiva who used to give a regular speech about how smiling at someone can change their lives. This speech really stuck with me and I started trying to smile at everyone when I said hello. A few months later someone told me that the fact that I smiled at them every day made yeshiva bareable for them (at the time I had no idea this person was unhappy, he hid it well).
Just one more story for me to pontificate in your comments section ;). When I visited Russia with my parents we went to a restaurant and ordered food, and afterwards we met with my parents’ friends and told them that the service was amazing. They said that it’s very unusual in Moscow and they’d like to go see it. When we went back with them they were rude to the waiters (one woman actually called someone “boy” who looked around the same age as my dad) and the service was shocking. The people we went with told us they were surprised and disappointed after the review we had given...
I can so see this restaurant scene (may not surprise you).
The "only a waitress" comments by the young person are the sort of thing it would never have occurred to me to say when I was a young activist. I may have had the good fortune to come into the kind of left-wing political milieu in which it was instilled in us that if we were serious about our politics we had to respect and care about people like the cleaners and the catering workers in the student union. Then again, perhaps there really has been a more general decline in interest in class politics in younger activist milieux over the past 45 years.
I knew your comments would be interesting. It’s why I was really shocked by the conversation - how can one be “progressive” if one is denigrating workers? Is this how the new left wing activists think?
Modern “progressive” identity politics, however, doesn’t seem to have any consideration of class. It’s why I feel left behind by the left. This is not something I recognise or embrace.
I remember reading *Grit* by Angela Duckworth - a self-help book about cultivating resilience - and in the section on finding purpose it talked about how someone could find meaning in something as 'menial' as cleaning toilets/being a janitor. That you could make an impact to other people and society in many imperceptible ways. I was working as a dish hand at the time, and during a moment of mental crisis it made the work tolerable.
I know exactly what you mean. Everything is important - my dishes are clean at the restaurant because you had been careful with your job, and that’s something I should really value. My husband had a stint as a dish hand too, while he was a student.
These “menial” jobs make everyone’s life more comfortable. I do wonder too (re Japanese attitudes) whether it is a coincidence that きれい (kirei) means both “beautiful” and “clean”. I have help with housecleaning through the NDIS, because I have huge issues bending and picking things up off the floor. I certainly do not take the work of the people who help me for granted, as I tell them often. It makes my life safer (they get stuff off the floor) and so much more pleasant.
Katy, this prompts a variety of thoughts for me that I will be better able to organise and articulate tomorrow morning when I am sober.
I really look forward to your comments.
Then there are those activists who believe that the oppression of one group by another is an injustice that must be reversed.
Indeed. The question I always have as a remedies lawyer is - how to fix such things fairly.
People can be rude to front-line service providers for a range of reasons. Those of us who work in teaching jobs in higher education are also service providers, but the power dynamics of our workplaces mean that the rudeness of the "customers" comes out in the anonymous comments in the end of trimester evaluations.
That’s opening a whole can of worms! Sometimes students have fair reasons to complain. Sometimes - the feedback is just mean (unduly personal), or relates to things I can’t control (the university IT system). I think the anonymity and online nature of it has given rise to nastier and more polarised comments.
Yes. I had one comment in my most recent teaching evaluation survey that proposed that the tutorials be held in smaller rooms that were configured to allow more interaction between students, rather than being held in lecture theatres. I posted an announcement to the students that I had seen this suggestion, and that I completely agreed with it, but that the allocation of teaching rooms by the timetabling office was beyond the control of anybody involved in teaching the course.
I think one thing that students deserve to be better informed about as part of their transition from school to university (but which university managements won't be in a hurry to tell them about) is that the typical Australian university is a larger and more complex organisation than anything they have previously encountered, and that there are consequences of this in terms of how decisions are made, and by whom, on matters that affect them.
This is lovely, Katy, and so true. I think changing the world is a small, granular enterprise, person by person. I resolved during the pandemic that I would stop worrying about things I can’t change or control and instead focus on the people and the work right in front of me. It’s a lot harder than talking but much more rewarding!
Yes. Sometimes my children get anxious about all the things in the world - but no point worrying about things they can’t change. And likewise, in the pandemic, I tried to focus on small moments of joy… all we could do, really.
‘Small moments of joy’ - exactly!
I agree with all of that, but I do find it amazing that an "activist", most of whom have literally the most broken models of the world I've ever encountered, and only rarely cost society less than they spend (i.e. are a net cost to society because they certainly are not making anything better, this is almost impossible if one has basically ,no idea how the world works) could look down on someone who who was doing an honest job for a living.
Well this is the whole thing. If you’re an activist, you get to say what’s needed to make the world better and if others don’t do it, or it doesn’t work, it’s clearly because other people are wrong and fallible and evil, not because your premises are wrong.
The reason an honest job is honest is precisely because it’s reality tested, something I keep thinking about. It has real outputs where you can measure the quality of your work in real time. It produces something of immediate worth.
Amen.
I was not quite as reactionary 10 years ago but living in Europe has made me really almost pathologically suspicious of anyone who thinks they know better than other people what those people need or want.
Yeah, the last five years or so have been an eye opener for me.
I think every activist - left or right, more or less radical - has a predisposition towards noticing what is wrong with society and the world, what is not working, and thus calling out the inequities and iniquities we see in the belief that these can be fixed through consciously political action. This is not a problem in itself - far from it. When it becomes a problem is when people get into the mindset of *only* noticing what is wrong with society and the world, thinking that everything is terrible, and either lapsing into despair or diving into the kind of revolutionism that wants to denounce everyone and smash everything.
A mature political outlook, and a mature outlook on what politics can and can't achieve, requires developing the ability to also notice what is good or at least satisfactory about society and the world, and being able to discern the difference between those things that really are in need of some kind of radical change, and those where the best outcomes will be achieved by incremental reform, or by simply managing competently what already exists, or by letting people carry on with their freely chosen activities from which benefits flow to the rest of us.
A certain kind of political activist is like the house visitor of the pre-digital area who would refuse to be told by the household that they had learned through experience that the TV reception was the best that they could get, and who would insist on pissfarting about with the antenna and the tuning knobs in a way that always irretrievably ruined whatever quality of reception the household had painstakingly achieved.
Some activists are not so much about doing good, as about being seen to be doing good, if that makes sense. They’re the ones I don’t like (and I have seen them on both sides of politics and in other contexts). They will attack you viciously if you point out that there are any problems with what they do - they’re not interested in the reality but the appearance - and they don’t want their pristine self-image to be tarnished. Frankly, I tend to think now that they’ve got serious personality disorders, having read a bit about these in the last few years.
These are the kind of people who freak me out in any activist group: the righteous zealots. In extremes, they will kill for the greater good of society, because any problem is not theirs, it’s a problem with society for not conforming to their ideals. And this is not a left-right thing - they’ll adapt to whatever the current zeitgeist favours.
In my cycling trips and other travels that have taken me up country over the past four years I have noticed a lot of short-staffing of cafes, restaurants, pubs and shops, especially in smaller towns. I have been conscious of larger phenomena such as economic conditions, and the pandemic and responses to it, that would have contributed to it, and of course I always remember that the front-line person at the counter has no control over such factors, and usually doesn't make decisions about cafe staffing, house policies, etc.