To do, Bill, todo. Like Max, Ive been mostly in one job, & enjoyed it, so this tells me something else, & worthy..
Dog
> On Jan 5, 2016, at 7:05 PM, Max Richards <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> O Bill, seven or eight jobs in a lifetime, and the underlying connection,
>
> the common factor emerges now convincingly.
>
> Lyrically done! the chorus that changes after the third stanza…
>
> In retirement I guess most do like you look back and ask:
> What was I doing?
>
> I know I do.
>
> And often think I might have lived a better life delivering mail,
> a job I did well and was healthy,
>
> Or as a librarian maybe.
>
> My two recent experiences of hospital have been striking:
>
> I’d been feeling how the life I’m away from, the NZ/Australian
> little world, had a strong communitarian element,
> whereas here in the US (meagre samples, yes) life seems
> more ‘every person for him/her-self’, dominated by the ethos of
> business competition.
> Though Australia has been moving that way, my recent experiences
> have made me pine for what used to be called ’the welfare state’.
>
> It turns out that the feel of the medical world - which I know is criicized
> for its being profit-driven, big pharma, etc., -
> has been: nurses and the rest doing their best for me, and giving off a sense
> of high morale that comes from feeling the skills you’ve acquired are being
> applied for the good of others.
>
> Your lines on teaching perhaps play down the good work I like to think
> you had a chance to do, and did.
> So that a full answer to your last question:
> what have I enabled?
> might come out with a few affirmations -
>
> the world of teachers like the world of nurses
> having a lot to be said about it that’s good…?
>
> Max in Seattle
>
> [the link below is to a piece that makes out teaching in Japan to be more honored
> than it is in the US:
> https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wired-success/201407/anti-intellectualism-and-the-dumbing-down-america
>
> On Jan 5, 2016, at 14:41, Bill Wootton <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> Keeping customers from ripping
>> into management, delivering
>> newspapers to right letterboxes,
>> prescription drugs to the pained.
>>
>> All my jobs, keeping
>> the lid on things.
>>
>> Getting groceries to suburban eaters,
>> intact dinner sets to entertainers,
>> payments to tertiary students,
>> statistics to government fiddlers.
>>
>> All my jobs, keeping
>> the lid on things.
>>
>> Squatting on bubbling-up in schools,
>> keeping bums on seats, hosing
>> down spitball revolutions,
>> affirming the competent.
>>
>> All my jobs, what
>> have I enabled?
>>
>> bw
Douglas Barbour
[log in to unmask]
https://eclecticruckus.wordpress.com/
Recent publications: (With Sheila E Murphy) Continuations & Continuations 2 (UofAPress).
Recording Dates (Rubicon Press).
Done in by creation itself.
I mean the gods. Not us. Well us too.
The gods moved into books. Who wrote the books?
We wrote the books. In whose dream, then are we dreaming?
Robert Kroetsch.
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