Where do we Stand?

My dad worked in a factory.  He worked there his whole life, starting when he was still a kid, dropping out of high school to help support his family because his dad, a carpenter, had fallen into drinking and couldn’t support his seven kids.  He went to war in 1943 and then came back to the same job, never getting his diploma, because now he had a family of his own, my brother Dan and me, and later, four more. 

He was a worker.  He wanted better things for us kids, though.  No “dirty jobs” for us.  He and my mom pushed us to aspire for white-collar jobs, and college.  Of the six of us, only one was defiant enough to choose the joy of working with his hands, and as a carpenter, at that.  The rest of us dress up for work, work with our heads, work in offices, and none of us have ever been in a union.

So my friend Bill’s comment led me to reflect on my own family of siblings, on our lives as Catholics, and to what extent we care about the workers who are getting whacked in today’s economy.   Having lost our oldest member

, I’m the cutting edge of the five of us, the first of two to retire as the other three see the least of their kids moving out on their own.  Each of the five of us grew up and grew older with a sense that if we worked hard now, we could relax later.  That was so with our dad and his generation, the ones that fill the restaurants at dinner with old couples having the “senior specials” and driving home in their Buicks and Mercurys and Chryslers. 

The five of us have three kids each, good Germans that we are, orderly and such.  Those 15 have entered the work world with blue collars as well as white, and are more like our parents’ generation than our own.  They are hairdressers, soldiers, carpenters, teachers, landscapers, and child care workers, more of what we would call “service workers” than we their parents, who have generally been “office workers”. 

Few of them have health insurance; we’d never have considered being without it.  Few of them have significant retirement plans, having moved around from job to job too quickly to have them stick, sometimes withdrawing their savings to pay bills between jobs. 

As I consider how they will struggle like our parents did, I consider how we “boomers” are tempted to hold onto the work-now-relax-later mentality our parents fought for, even as we watch our children struggle as our parents did.  In Michigan, I discovered with shock, we retirees pay no state income tax on our retirement income, even as our children do.  We relax and don’t pay, they struggle and do.

Yesterday I wrote of St. Joseph, the Worker who stood behind Jesus, enabling him to develop his potential, just as our parents did for us “boomers”.  But it’s important that we “Christians” consider that Jesus did not work for awhile to relax later, to contribute to his 401k and find heaven on earth on the edge of a golf course with beach privileges.  He called u to be laborers in the field, fishers of souls.  He led us by example to fight for justice, to heal and teach and always be present to the God within us, calling us to compassion and courage.

Bill and his wife Billie are not kicking back.  They are, as Joseph, standing behind those who need nurturing, and like Jesus touching and teaching and healing and accompanying and speaking out.

I, for one, need to consider where I stand.