Take Our Daughters And Sons To Work Day, 2019

Ranch kids at work.  Not because it was take them to work day, but because they're ranch kids.

Today is National Take Our Daughters And Sons To Work Day for 2019.

I don't think this day is observed as much as it was, at least in the press, as it was a few years ago.  I'm not sure what that means. Times have been rather odd for the past few years and perhaps that has something to do with it, or perhaps not.

One of the great, and actually truthful, career recruiting posters.

At any rate, I have to wonder how many people even have occupations where they can really do this.  I don't, and it's not like I'm operating heavy machinery.  It just wouldn't be practicable until your kids were old enough to know more or less what you do anyway.

Not that I haven't done this on odd occasion, the most notable of which is when my son traveled with me to an argument in Tribal Court some years ago.  And they stop in from time to time for one reason or another.  And, I suspect, like all children of trial lawyers, they hear a lot of practiced debates and see their lawyer parent working from home.

Of course, they've been exposed a lot to ranch work as well, which brings me I suppose to my point. That participation is not in a "take your . . .to work", but work.

It's an odd world we live in now in which by and large our kids don't really see us work.  It's part of the transition of the Industrial Revolution and the migration of people from the rural to the urban.  And as that's occurred, work has become very self isolating.  Most people spend at least a third of their day working, usually more, five days out of seven.  In the United States, where work has a manic level of devotion, a lot of people spend more time there than that. And as they do that, they associate themselves with their coworkers, some of whom are their friends, if they are lucky, but many of whom are just people they meet at work.  

And most modern work isn't fun.  It's interesting how that well known fact.  Forbes Magazine has called the line "It's not supposed to be fun, that's why they call it work", a "Business Lie", but for many people it isn't.  Young people are counseled to find careers that they will love, but at least if people who keep statistics on it are correct, most don't.

Now, this isn't to say that some don't, and it isn't to say that the counselling is bad.  What it might be is to say that a lot of career field propaganda is just that, propaganda.  People are coaxed into "fun and exciting careers in. . . ", when they aren't all that fun or exciting.

Of course, a lot of people simply fall into a career as well, they start off to be African Underwater Ornithology Scientist but things happen and they end up the IT guy at Big Boxes Dun Be Us, Dude.  Life has always been that way, and there's not much you can really say about that.  Early planning and changes in it have long term consequences.

Which is a good reason that careers and those in them shouldn't lie about them, and why society at large shouldn't do the same and encourage misdirection. But both do.  There's the common American story that you can be whatever you want, at any age, and have it all.  None of that is true, but the first statement is closest to true.  The second and third are absolute bald faced lies.

So too are the numerous statements individual careers make about themselves.  For odd reasons, we subscribe here to the New Zealand Air Force's magazine, and I love it. For one thing, I like airplanes. But to read the issue the RNZAF is the Royal New Zealand Fun Corps and you'd be left with the impression that the RNZAF does nothing but fun and games at government expense all day long, with an occasional break to rescue kittens.

My exposure to other careers is fairly broad because one of my occupations, my day job so to speak, exposes me to a pile of other ones.  That makes it pretty plain that some careers are a lot more honest about their natures than others.  The military is semi honest, but rarely is it fully honest that its job is to kill people and break things in service of the nation.  

Rhodesian bush war era recruiting poster.  "[I]nteresting and varied career. . . "?  Well, maybe, in a way.

Oddly enough, because it receives so much criticism for its "romanticism", agriculture, particularly ranching, is extremely close to its public image.  Whether you would like doing it or not, the way cowboys are portrayed is surprisingly close to what its like to actually do the job, right down to the outdoor work in all weather, being around animals, and the low pay.  If you've seen the movie The Cowboys, you actually have a decent concept of what cowboys actually do.  Perhaps that's why nearly 100% of the adults I've found who in agriculture absolutely love it. They knew what they were getting into when they got into it.  And perhaps that's why I've also observed that a lot of young people who move off the ranch to go into other careers, come back around and back onto the ranch after their exposed to the fabrication of what other careers are like, or they work in those other careers for decades attempting to get back into what they left.

The law is notorious about lying about the nature of its career to outsiders.  Law schools like to put out the absolute nonsense that "you can do a lot of things with a law degree".  You can, as long as all of those things are practicing law.  Otherwise, a law degree is about as broad as a diesel mechanics certificate.  You can do a lot of thing with that as well, as long as they all involve diesel engines.  That's not bad if that's exactly what you expected to do, and you knew the actual nature of the work and what it entailed.

Romantic?  I've seen this actually happen.

Of course, part of what work entails involves what its like to actually experience it, and that's really hard to explain.  People like depictions of certain activities, including some of them which are in fact careers or occupations, but that doesn't mean that they would actually like to experience them.  To give a rather extreme example, I like watching what's depicted in Saving Private Ryan, but that doesn't mean I'd want to experience it.  Not really.  That's often forgotten.  People actually join the military because they've watched military films and been enthralled.  The character portrayed, for example, in Born On The Fourth Of July claimed that he joined the Vietnam era Marines after watching John Wayne films such as The Sands of Iwo Jima.  Taking that at face value, it would have been wise to recall that John Wayne was an actor, not an actual Marine, and his character, Sgt. Stryker, is killed in the film.  Indeed, there's piles of death in the film.

Lawyer researching the law.  What doesn't come across is that he may be researching a desperate cause in which his client has pinned all his hopes on this research and it looks really bad.

The same is more or less true of other professions. To use the law as an example again, watching a movie about a trial, such as The Verdict, Anatomy Of A Murder, or A Civil Action, or even A Few Good Men, may be enthralling but that doesn't really mean that you'd really enjoy the high stress of being a trial lawyer.  Maybe you would. But before you engage in it, you ought to appreciate whether you endure high stress well or not.  But it's frankly nearly impossible to appreciate that without experiencing it, and a lot of folks don't until they're in the situation.  

All of these factors have been around for men at least from the point where some fellow left his peasant village in Paderborn Westphalia and headed off to the university in some Medieval town, but I think the added factor, and difficulty, is that its now been foisted upon women.  That may sound like an odd thing to say, but since World War Two we've gone from a world in which most women worked at home, but could have some kind of job, to one where they could have careers if they wanted, to one where carers are now demanded of them.  With that has been the whole absurd Cosmopolitan line that "you can have it all", which wasn't ever true of any occupation to start with.  Every occupation, even the one that's absolutely the best for you individually, entails compromises and generations of acclimation or perhaps genetic predisposition predisposes men to that reality.  It hasn't really done that for women which means that the uploaded expectations are necessarily met with massive failure in realization.  Added to that is the several decades long abandonment of male responsibility in general which leaves many women with the choice to either occupy the traditional role of mother alone while also working, or forgo it entirely, and their burdens have been increased enormously.  At least recently, although ironically coincident with their being pushed into traditional male roles where they're often subsequently sexually exploited, there's also been a return to allowing for them to assume a more traditional role if they wish.  By the late 1970s and through the 1980s there was massive social ridicule if they wished to attempt that.

Of course, part of the problem here is that society is now so geared to this that it's almost impossible for society at large to imagine anything else.  Trades jobs go unfilled as the young are pushed away from them.  People are pushed from local jobs to ones in big cities far away.  A student loan system has been created to fund the pursuit of degrees that are known to be unlikely to result in employment, and currently its faddish in the Democratic Party to suggest that this system should be expanded into one in which the taxpayers at large will fund that on a society wide level.

So, it's take your daughters and sons to work day for 2019.  But be honest.  And kids. . . choose well.