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[wombat]

It's presumptuous and condescending to assume that life he made was somehow sad or worth less because of who his employer was or what job he did.

QFT, brevity, and lack of cuss words.

[littlefallsmets]

First off, no, no I've never worked one of those types of jobs... though I've worked some comparatively menial stuff. Nearly everyone I know other than myself has, though, and it has never been described to me as anything other than some fresh hell.

Second, I'm not saying that working that kind of job is bad or wrong or anything... what I am saying is that it is just crushingly sad to me that this dude has ONLY done that, for his entire adult life, the same way that I can't watch "It's A Wonderful Life" because it's just so shitty that George Bailey doesn't get to see an inch of the world and (by HEAVENLY MANDATE) is crucified against the town of Bedford Falls and how... that's supposed to be the happy ending, he gets to protect a town of incompetent co-dependents from Mr. Potter until the day he dies and then Wal-Mart does the same thing to the town that Potter was going to do to it except with more faces and American flags and Bibles.

If you're a kid and you're working that kind of job, it's just a bad job, if you've got limited abilities and that's all you can do, that's one thing, if you're an old-timer and you just need a part-time gig to get out of the house, that's another thing too but...

An entire life. The enormity of it, an entire life, just punching in and out for the Meatclown.

Lemme... gather my thoughts on this, I'll get back to y'all.

[Victoria Waterfield]

I'm a burger fanatic. If you are too you should check out this blog.

OK, so I didn't want to weigh in on this thread because it has gotten into politics, and my politics basically only match up with G. K. Chesterton's, so pretty much no matter who I argue with I am going to get loudly told why I am wrong. But I had to point out that the top thing on that blog was people eating cheeseburgers on top of every mountain, and that, to my mind, is an unholy alliance of two completely separate nerdy things along the lines of yelling at every U2 song for sucking in its own specific way while riding in a solar-powered car, and I just want to say that we can do better than this, people.

[Choop]

pst right beside your post is an edit button perfect for quick changes like that - just click the pencil

[pmcd9]

VW gets a can for pointing out the dichotomy of climbing mountains and eating hamburgers.

[smick]

OK, so I didn't want to weigh in on this thread because it has gotten into politics, and my politics basically only match up with G. K. Chesterton's, so pretty much no matter who I argue with I am going to get loudly told why I am wrong. But I had to point out that the top thing on that blog was people eating cheeseburgers on top of every mountain, and that, to my mind, is an unholy alliance of two completely separate nerdy things along the lines of yelling at every U2 song for sucking in its own specific way while riding in a solar-powered car, and I just want to say that we can do better than this, people.

Yes.  Perhaps they could eat a taco inside a cheese burger wrapped in a pizza, while sitting in a hot tub that they drug to the top of that mountain.  (Doesn't more make better?)

[Choop]

Pizza?! Now that's what I call a taco!

[theinevitable]

favorite joke ever.

[Toaster]

If you can climb a mountain, odds are you haven't eaten at McDonalds in several years, if ever.

[greenkoolayd]

If you can climb a mountain, odds are you haven't eaten at McDonalds in several years, if ever.

the appalachians close to my neignborhood are tiny.

[littlefallsmets]

I guess what I'm trying to say is that...

It is sad that the dude's life was limited to that, that quiet desperation. Not that he was a bad person for it... but my pity and my empathy for the guy is boundless, I wish the world didn't work in a manner that could make a man flip burgers 250 days a year in one place for the lionshare of a life and...

Then, at the end of it all, that's all he's ever seen and he's a four-paragraph human interest story .

I wish this man could'a seen the world. 

Dignity of a day's work, different strokes for different folks, you can say alla that and you have your points but this dude, there was a world out there and that was what fate gave the dude. It's heartbreaking.

There are worse things in the world to project, I would imagine, than self-pity.

Is the actual sane response to "a man flipped burgers for fifty years straight" "well, he must've had a good time because he just kept doing it!"? I'm sorry, I don't buy that as the sane response.

"What an awful world it is forced him to spend his life flipping burgers" probably isn't the sanest response either but I have to think it's more productive than going the other way and just.... projecting monk-like dignity onto his life of petty servitude, either.

That answer sounds more like an attempt to maintain status-quo than some kind of "live and let live" thing.

It seems like a tidy way to resolve an entirely unjust system of living. At least frantic over-identification isn't just a shrug, "oh fifty years of doing a needed task I don't want to do, glad he did it, hope he liked it", man, that ain't a valediction I'd wish on a rabid dog.

Yes, it's all projection, everything's projection.

"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is doubtlessly projection, "love thy neighbor" is certainly projection, "desire is suffering" is probably right up there with it all. So is greedy people reading greed into others to justify their greed and so nobody has any medicine. So is people who can't fully believe in God so they wage war on people with other gods that it might talk them into believing themselves.

The ringworm thing you guys were talking about in that other thread. All of it.

Knee-jerk compassion might be crazy but the instant creation of a tight reality-preserving narrative where he REALLY REALLY LIKED having people curse him out for not omitting pickles for the balance of his adult life, man, that's at least as crazy and probably at least a little bit more counterproductive.

I wish that all the energy we put into justifying things as they are, creating inequalities to protect ourselves from other inequalities, creating wars to protect us into other wars, I wish we'd put that energy instead into helping people like this dude see a little bit more of the world before he shuffles off to the grave.

And sure, I hope that people wish me the same, hell yes, who wouldn't?

And sure, it's probably not completely emotionally healthy to feel that way.

But I just wanna swoop down like a motherfuck*ng angel of light into this man's past and I wanna give him a suitcase and I want him to cover it with travel labels from Italy and Baghdad and Samarkand...

And just because that's impossible doesn't mean it's wrong.

I... guess that's what I was trying to say.

[dejavroom]

It is sad that the dude's life was limited to that, that quiet desperation.[...] Yes, it's all projection, everything's projection.

Well, why should anyone care about the little Mcdonald's worker that lives inside your head?

I wish that all the energy we put into justifying things as they are, creating inequalities to protect ourselves from other inequalities, creating wars to protect us into other blahblahblorp.

But I just wanna swoop down like a motherfuck*ng angel of light into this man's past and I wanna give him a suitcase and I want him to cover it with travel labels from Italy and Baghdad and Samarkand...

As for me, I just want to teach the world to sing. Does anybody even remember laughter?

[AugustWest]

my politics basically only match up with G. K. Chesterton's,

I haven't read a lot of Chesterton's essays, but he was pretty conservative, no?  Feel free to ignore the personal question, but are you a Roman Catholic?

Loved Father Brown, though.

[Victoria Waterfield]

I haven't read a lot of Chesterton's essays, but he was pretty conservative, no?  Feel free to ignore the personal question, but are you a Roman Catholic?

Loved Father Brown, though.

Conservative in some ways, immensely radical (by today's standards) in others. Yes, I am a Roman Catholic.

I too love Father Brown.

[dejavroom]

(meanwhile, I submit that the saddest thing is the headline "Children die at milk party" [it is also the cutest, but]).