outsourcerer

I grew up in Germany on a water mill and farm that had been in my family's possession for over 800 years. Farmers love to see their kids become farmers also, and so did my parents. They talk their brood into developing love for the soil and for hard, honest work. They proudly tell their children about generations of down-to-earth business as down-to-earth can ever be. Aah, farming! One of the two oldest professions, both trustworthy and noble ...

It didn't take long for me to figure out that farms in Northern Germany made most money producing sugar beets, a highly subsidized crop. For decades German farmers survived--some of them quite comfortably--by destroying the livelihood of cane sugar farmers worldwide. The German government--the tax payer--has a nice history of preventing outsourcing.

Before I hit age 21 I learned that, to a degree, starvation in developing countries was caused and maintained by people in civilized (sic!) countries too proud and arrogant to let go of their outdated jobs. I was one of those people. As if it's not enough of a guilt trip to grow up German, the idea of continued farming and family tradition made me sick to my stomach. If you dumb yourself down enough and numb yourself sufficiently, you can do it.

How deeply can you be in love with "your own" soil, your clod of earth, when you know it's been financed by people who have nothing to eat, and paid for by your fellow countrymen who actually produce something of real market value? Hell, I probably killed people (in the Third World, as it used to be called back then) just by growing up peacefully.

It never seizes to amaze me how murderous non-violence can be. Apropos, the holocaust was not based on violence and hatred, either: it was made possible by a non-violent society, by people who wanted nothing more than their damn peace, by individuals like you and me lacking balls and spine to stand up for themselves and for another person's very life. You know, it took me many years to realize this, but the dirty truth is I have no respect whatsoever for a soft spoken ass who wants peace no matter what. Peaceful people can be of the most cruel nature.

Uh yes, we do have a subject. Prevention of outsourcing the sugar production in Germany not only guaranteed existing jobs, but permitted for new generations of farmers to grow into the same position of down-to-earth thievery. Yes, I learned that too: someone who tells you he is down-to-earth may just as well be a thief, willing for others to pay exorbitant taxes so that he can pretend to be needed in his society. Moreover, the down-to-earth person may not stop stealing from you until all you have left is the bare earth you are sitting on. Down to the last bit of earth you got ... if you happen to live on the wrong side of the globe. For the last thirthy some years I have not trusted anybody selling herself as a down to earth individual.

Remember "the elevator man?" These guys--yeah, definitely a vocation too sophisticated for women--spent their miserable lives in uniforms, riding up and down in a stinky cube with people too elevated to have a one-minute conversation with. There was a time in the history of employment when elevator operators were scared to lose their dreadful jobs! You think you hate your job? Pussy (I won't apologize)! No matter what you do for a living, it can't possibly be as dark and doomed as being literally stuck in an elevator your entire adult life. 30 - 40 years in an elevator, imagine that. And they still hated losing their jobs to computers that would allow a five year old to reach her destination if she was tall enough to push the correct button.

I can relate to folks afraid to lose their jobs to someone in Asia who can do the same for a fraction of the money you demand. But, do you miss the career opportunity of the elevator man? As high up as he got from time to time, how sad and disappointed are you that you are denied his kind of life? If you don't suffer from the absence of superb elevator operator job opportunities, nobody will miss the jobs you deem worth defending today--thirty years from now. Sooner or later the stuff you are doing will be obsolete.

People hate their jobs, and then they hate it even more when their object of hatred has been given to someone else to hate. Sure, we want to end poverty in the world and we like to help people, but giving them what we hate--our most useless jobs--is still too good for them. We like to help people in developing regions with goodies that are worse than what we hate. Quietly we hope these people in India, China, Vietnam, and Pakistan will become as civilized as we are. We hope they will become thieves like us, also willing to steal tax money from productive people. We hope they too will be callous enough one day to take from the poorest who'd love to do better--uh, when it comes to your job you don't think cheaper is better, do you?--what we can do so wonderfully expensive. For those who object to outsourcing, civilized equals superfluous.

If your job can be given away, there is something better for you to do, something more meaningful, with a real market value and most likely greater compensation. Being pissed off at "evil corporations" for losing hated jobs that lack sophistication and can't pay for their existence is one of the dumbest things I have seen our societies capable of. Why aren't we upset with an educational system and with school teachers who fail to teach what we need to make money without reaching into other people's pockets?

Funny, some of the wealthiest individuals on planet earth don't have a complete college or even high school education. They did not learn their trade or craft in school. They certainly didn't learn in school how to be successful. Teachers can teach you how to become a slave, how to get a job you will hate for life, and how to hold on to your subject of hatred until you retire and die (peacefully). School teachers have learned from their teacher's union--one of the most powerful organizations in the country--to use political leverage to maintain outdated, idiotic, and useless things.

Teachers are failing daily to teach what a human being needs to know to adapt to quickly changing markets, to be creative to invent your own opportunities as you need them, to keep you out of slavery, to--God forbid--make yourself and those around you happy. Too much to ask, I know. I don't blame the teachers. But by Gus, I cannot blame companies for their interest in making a profit for their shareholders--for you and me--and for moving to other locations that which everybody here has hated to do for years. How nuts are we, really?!

Who has taught us to crave slavery so much? We are willing to do what we hate to put $2,000 rims on our cars? What a crooked, corrupt bunch of useless pricks we are! My shiny rims are more important than a dumbass in India who wants to feed his damn brats? Fifty years from now, most of the employment market as we know it will have disappeared, and rightfully so. Our modern day job slavery will be abolished. Those who hang on to it are not on your side, nor on the side of humanity.

Motivational speakers? Gone, 'cause only people who hate what they're doing need motivational snake oil. Blood sucking slave traders, I'm sorry: employment agencies like Monster, will not be looked at as favorably in the distant future. Preparation for retirement will be called by its name: time-released suicide. Hey, you want to retire some day? You know already your life sucks!

We hate it, and therefore it must be a good thing? If that's what you learned in school, you should have spent that time with a truck load of bourbon. It could not have been worse. I do what I hate and I hate what I do until retire, is a statement of a wasted life. How pathetic!

"What do you want to do?" means for too many people, "I don't know. I have to see what's out there that I can hate doing." I am confident that's not you, but we spend our lives next to people who think and suffer that way through their desperate existence.

Instigate individuals to make a buck in their own name, outside of the slavery of jobs. It costs you nothing to make someone else hungry to take initiative for her own business. Question the status quo, and you may help a person realize there is a "parallel world" of more fun, more profit, and perhaps more happiness ripe and ready to be picked.

Egbert