Professional CNN Minority Scold Ruben Navarette, Jr. says Newt Gingrich had it right:
America's kids really are a bunch of lazy smegheads and if we used them for labor instead of immigrants, SHINING CITIES ON HILLS, people.
Talk to hugely successful people, Gingrich said, and most of them will say that they got an early start learning about jobs and responsibility and earning money for their labor. Tragically, that's not happening with many young people today. Gingrich pointed out that, for instance, among African-American teenagers, the unemployment rate is a staggering 43%.
Now, you can spin a statistic like that one of two ways. You can say these unemployed black teenagers are helpless victims and the system is working against them. Or you can say that many of these teenagers are unemployable because no one ever taught them the skills necessary to hold down a job.
I'm trying to figure out how cleaning toilets gives ones the skills to be successful in anything other than cleaning toilets, but you'll excuse me for the oversight. One would be forgiven for saying that Navarette is buying into the notion that the world simply needs ditch-diggers too, and that some of us should simply accept that fact. Be cheerful with your lot in life...and we could lower unemployment if we just guided these poor, wretched souls to the promised land of industrial strength cleaners and mops.
Bravo for Newt. Politicians don't usually speak this way, which is why so many of them have mastered the art of talking for hours without saying anything of importance. I can't imagine Mitt Romney saying these things; he's too busy telling people what they want to hear to tell them what they need to hear. This subject is as important as they come, and Gingrich deserves credit for kicking off the discussion, especially since he was sure to be pummeled for stating the obvious.
Here's the obvious: Americans have lost their work ethic, and some never had one to lose. They grow up -- or put more precisely, they're raised -- thinking of so many jobs as beneath them that they wake up one day not knowing how to do any job.
You know, plenty of folks were raised to do these things called "chores" where one would perform manual property labor in exchange for small amounts of spending money. What that taught them was A) manual labor is backbreaking and not something you want to grow up and make a career of most likely and B) your parents probably had a point when they said "You should stay in school so you can learn things that mean you don't have to do this for a living."
But then Ruben goes for the obvious exit from this pit.
Gingrich was right on the money. But I would go further than he did. This isn't just a problem for black Americans; it's a problem for all Americans. In fact, as someone who speaks to groups all over the country and who spends a fair amount of time visiting high schools and colleges, I worry less about students from poor families who lack resources and opportunities than I do about those from the upper-middle class who lack passion and purpose.
Poor kids often have a fire in their belly, a desire to improve their lot and help their parents. Upper-middle class kids can be harder to motivate, especially if they've never been taught to work by their parents.
You think I'm kidding. I remember once seeing a 21-year-old struggle with how to hold a broom and sweep the floor. It wasn't his fault. No one had ever taught him how to do that chore -- or any other. Whenever I write about young people and the jobs they won't do, I hear from dozens of employers with stories of their own. The common theme in all those e-mails is that we've been too soft on our kids and haven't demanded enough from them, something we hardly notice because we've allowed illegal immigrants to pick up the slack.
And here's where Navarette gives away the ball game. His last sentence here is really what his entire rant (and Newt's rant that spawned it) was really all about. If we made America's kids do the kind of work that undocumented immigrants do today, we wouldn't have a problem. We could solve the minority unemployment problem. We could take away the reason for undocumented immigrants to come here. We'll raise up both of these destroyed, primitive cultures and we won't have to feel guilty at all. Hooray! A free market solution!
Except that's exactly what the President's AmeriCorps program did, and did it well enough that
House Republicans zeroed out the budget for the program this year, calling it "waste and fraud". The
compromise that spared the program still ended up cutting the budget for it by 6.7%. When House Republicans put forward their 2012 budget in October,
they once again zeroed out all funding for the program.
In other words, not only does the program that Newt Gingrich and Ruben Navarette describe as needed to teach kids "work ethics"
exist already, but
Republicans keep trying to kill the damn thing.
Idiots. It's like Democrats never thought of these things. Of course, you can make the argument that Newt just wants to bring indentured servitude back too.
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