Bring back America’s work ethic

My grandfather is one of the toughest men alive, at least as far as I’m concerned.

He was born in 1917 and I have a picture of him as a baby up on my wall. In the picture, his father is in a pair of overalls and boots, holding and smiling at him. His mother, also smiling, stands in the doorway of a tiny shack mounted on a pair of skids. It’s a picture of a young family as they follow a logging camp through the forests of Washington. Long hours to earn a poor-man’s dollar, logging in the early 1900s was a dangerous job where injuries were guaranteed and death wasn’t a stranger. This is where my grandfather grew up.

When he was old enough, my grandfather took up logging himself while also tending to the cows, chickens, crops and other chores necessary to run their small farm. He was up before dawn and in bed long after the sun went down. While still a young man he laid railroad track in the hot summer sun in Indiana and operated a log-boom tugboat in Port Angeles. He served in World War II in the Pacific Theater. Somewhere in the 1980s he retired out of the U.S. Forest Service after spending years tromping all over the Cascade Mountains surveying, first with pack mules, later in trucks. By the time he retired he was near the top in the ranks and wrote several of the manuals still used today. Not too long ago I visited him in Idaho. Now in his 90s, there he was walking up and down the steep slope in his backyard digging fence-post holes, mixing concrete and pruning branches.

I could go on and on about what am amazing man he is, but that’s a different story for another time. My point is, my grandfather grew up when hard work was expected. It was a necessity. It was the normal way of life. Earning what you have was something to be proud of and society shunned a man who wasn’t willing to work. On one hand, I can say I’m proud to have had the opportunity to grow up watching my grandfather and using him as my role model for what a man should be. But I swear, more and more I think maybe it was a curse. I feel like a stranger living in a strange land these days.

I live in a country where working hard is something to be avoided and even mocked. “Work is for suckers” seems to be the motto of an ever-increasing portion of the populace. What took me a long time to believe (and several people still can’t believe) is the fact that many young Americans today are more than willing to settle for a slacker life — a life wherein even if you have little to nothing to show for yourself, it’s worth it. Get up at the crack of noon, eat a bag of pork rinds while watching daytime television, take a nap and wait for the government money to arrive. That’s far easier than getting up early and working to earn three or four times what your entitlement check is.

Since the 1960s, the country has devolved more and more into a culture of “you owe me,” “I deserve” and “I’m entitled.” How often do we catch a story in the news about somebody getting arrested after calling 911 because McDonald’s screwed up an order? Or, people protesting because the bank has the audacity to expect them to repay a loan? We gripe and complain about the size of the deficit, but just try mentioning that we as a nation may need to tighten our spending. People lose their minds. Oh sure, we want to see the country get out of the red, but under no circumstances do we accept that it may hurt a little, or that we should be willing to sacrifice a bit here or there.

“Take it from somebody else but don’t take it from me” is the way we think now. A truly odd bit of logic about all this is the idea that while I shouldn’t have to work, everybody else around me should keep working and be squeezed for as much as possible to pay for my rent, utilities and food (oh, and my phone, iPod and Xbox, too). How does a culture survive when each person thinks they should be allowed to stay at home and sponge off of everybody else? It’s like a remora fish attaching itself to another remora. Not going to survive long like that.

Sound like my column is just a rant? Not quite. You see, I honestly see a silver lining in all of this. As I mentioned in the beginning of this column, my grandfather grew up in tough times when you had to work hard to live. He was a teenager when the Great Depression hit. If you wanted to eat, have clothes and a roof over your head, you had to earn it. Nothing could be taken for granted.

And so, here we are in the midst of deep recession. Forget the glossed, dressed-up-for-the-public unemployment rate. The actual percentage is closer to 15 percent. People are losing everything. Executives are breaking down and applying at Wal-Mart. People who used to make six figures a year are now collecting glass and cans to turn in to the recycler. How can that possibly be a good thing? Because it gives me hope that maybe, just maybe, my country will see a big reset in our values and what we take for granted.

I dare say that we are long overdue for a nationwide slap to get us to come to our senses. We are generations deep into the “gimme gimme gimme” mentality and there was no way we had any hope of every getting out of it without something major bringing us out of it. Was this it? I hope so.

Ben Compton is a Palmer resident and publishes his column under the tagline “Compton’s Corner,” the same title used by his grandmother, Phyllis Compton, a longtime Frontiersman columnist.