Weight of the World

The End of a World p. 317

This article by Bourdieu discusses the end of the age of metallurgy plants. He grew up in on of the many towns that was built around a plant or mill that would employ thousands of residents. These mass-employment business are now being shutdown by smaller businesses which only employ fifty to a hundred people. This evolution in society is having many effects. I often think about the life of a mill worker. I attended a small college in a small town in South Carolina. The majority of the county was employed by a number of textile mills in the area. It was one of the poorest areas in one of the poorest states in the nation. Life was not easy, nor was it good to many of these people. There was a high number of high schools drop outs, and many of locals had never traveled further than fifty miles away. Life was not easy, but at least they had a job. Right? Well, I’m not sure about that. Is it ok that thousands of families have been locked into dead-end jobs from generation to generation? The best someone could do would be a promotion to manager, but even that would be a poor quality position relatively from our perspective. Say a man working in a mill has a family, how does he support them? How does he put them through school? I don’t mean to exclude working mothers here, but in that region, working moms were rare. Still, working moms generally had poor paying jobs too. The mill was back-breaking, often monotonous labor, usually in unhealthy conditions, but it was all there was. There was not time or resources for considering life outside the mill town. Children did not think about leaving town, nor were they aware of the possibility to do something more with their lives and careers. So is it a bad thing that the age of the mass-employment plants and mill-towns is coming to and end? However, there is a problem to which I wonder how we will respond as a society. I was watching the movie I Robot last week. I was amazed at the special effects and technological improvements and ideas that these types of movies impose on our realities. But as I sat there and watched this society in which everyone owned a robot, I wondered how everyone was able to afford and robot, and if robots were doing all the work, then what was everyone doing for work? Even at the end of the movie, robots were going to replace the military. What I would venture to guess is that even though there was not a poor person showed in the entire movie, there was another part of the city where the unemployed and impoverished masses lie in social darkness and obscurity. The scene outside of the city would probably be more reminiscent of Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. Millions of people unemployed and permanently locked out of the elite, locked out of social and economic growth, not to mention equality.

As we move into the future, we need to look at how our wealth is made and used because the easier we make our lives, the harder it gets for other people. Every little bit of good we take comes from a resource, and more often than not, that resource is directly, if not indirectly, linked to human beings. We save money on goods and services because our goods are made in other countries where there are no labor laws. In our quest for social utopia and a care-free, pain-free, effotless world, we need to look at for everyone else besides our selves. This, after all, is our goal to enjoy life without having to work, but to be served and to be able to enjoy our time and resources. But in this quest, we must not overlook the plight of the child in bonded slavery in India who makes our goods or the fourth generation mill worker in South Carolina who is paid pennies for hard labor. At some point we must face this difficult paradox… or we can just live in ignorance.