US First Lady Michelle Obama, visiting Pascagoula, Mississippi, promised the US government would not forget those affected.
‘This isn’t over yet. And this administration is going to stand with the people of the Gulf until folks are made whole again,’ she said.
I’ve just come across the above quote on RTE’s news website. I assume it’s accurate and if it is I find it quite disturbing. The issue of suicide has been kicking about over the last week, especially in relation to young people and there seeming inability to cope with the circumstances of life. It strikes me that comments like the one above don’t help. The implication is that the people of the Gulf of Mexico are somehow diminished by their circumstances. So much so that they are no longer to be considered “whole” people.
The suggestion is that the way in which one makes ones living is an intrinsic part of what makes you a whole person. It is this very thinking that is at the root of the emotional crisis so many people are experiencing as a result of unemployment or the threat of unemployment. I have some considerable experience with this issue being unemployed now for almost nine years.
My current status is that of Full Time Student (on holidays). This is an acceptable status which would probably classify me as a “whole” person. Unlike the previous eight years for which I was not a “whole” person. Mind you I spent six months with the tax status “self-employed” so I assume that counted as “whole”. Personally I found that period to be particularly unwholesome as I was not very good at it nor employed doing much of anything. But I was trying so maybe that counts for something.
I spent another six months being officially “unemployed” and that must count me as “whole” because I was paid by the state for that. I did even less for that six months but as there was no reduction for all of me not being there I assume I was a “whole” person.
Funnily enough the period during which I experienced wholeness was after that when I ceased to have any status with anyone officially. I was taking care of my kids while my spouse went off to be made “whole” on a daily basis. It was the impending change in that circumstance as the last of my kids went off to college that made me feel incomplete and prompted me to go to full time education.
The really serious point that I want to make is the damage that is done when people in positions of influence make statements like the one quoted above. It is the drip, drip, drip effect of statements such as this that is so corrosive to peoples emotional and mental states. If Michelle Obama had spoken of her confidence in the ability of the people of the Gulf of Mexico to cope in the face of adversity and in their capacity to use their existing knowledge and skills to overcome the circumstances in which they had found themselves, she would have been emphasizing their wholeness.
My son has just reminded me of the U-curve. That representation of the process of learning a new skill where the learner starts by having an early sense of success when learning a new skill only to have it replaced by a down feeling as they realize how much of this new skill they don’t know. Sticking with that feeling (along the bottom of the U) will eventually lead to an upswing as the individual builds on the newly acquired knowledge until they reach the top and consider themselves competent or expert.
He pointed out to me that knowledge of this process is now part of the problem. Knowing what lies ahead emotionally in learning to cope with new sets of circumstances is driving young people to seek alternatives to the delayed gratification involved in learning how to cope. Nothing in their upbringing has prepared them for the emotions elicited by waiting for a process to run it’s course, be it an economic cycle or accumulation of material goods. Some things just take time.
And some things just run out of time. My fathers people were blacksmiths going back eight generations. They are no more. I did a search for blacksmiths on the 1901 and 1911 census recently. County Limerick has some 400 plus blacksmiths in 1901. In 1911 the number was approx. 350. The CSO websites gives figures for each succeeding census from 1926(?) and it shows a steady decline until by 1976 blacksmiths no longer had a number to themselves and were lumped in with “other metal workers”. By 1976 my Uncle Paddy, a man with consummate skill as a blacksmith and farrier, had become “other metal workers”. Did this make him less “whole”? I think not.
A person is never less than “whole”. The skills they have may or may not be useful depending on the exigencies of the marketplace but as a person, as an individual they are as they were born, a complete and unique human being. We need to stop confusing the work a person has been trained to do with their value as a person. The value of a particular set of skills is quite simply a decision we make. If we value something we pay more attention to it and we are willing to pay more for it. That’s why people of a certain class in society are willing to pay large sums to incompetent bank managers. They value people like themselves.
The real travesty of recent years was the failure of government to value those skills associated with the jobs that would be needed in the future. They stood looking at the ground around their own feet and saw nothing but people like themselves. People who paid other people to do physical labour for them. Not for them the task of managing teams of well educated scientists or software engineers who knew themselves to be every bit the bosses equal.
