I completed a job a few weeks that was really, really hard. One of the other trades told me that if I got it done the way I planned, I would be fit to play for the Green Bay Packers in two weeks.
Well, that wasn’t true, but I did emerge much stronger.
What I noticed, though, after some of my more exhausting days was that the world had an interesting quality to me. Some standing wave in me was placed in temporary stasis, permitting new emotions to emerge.
I think a lot of the ascetic practices of religions around the world have something like this as an aim. If you can exhaust one part of you, some other part wakes up, or sees the light of daylight and consciousness.
I also feel strongly that all young Americans should be expected to do hard physical labor for at least a year or two in their lives. I hear many call for mandatory military service. I think it could be as simple as required vocational training.
There are far too many college graduates who have literally never gotten their hands dirty, who have never broken a sweat while at work, and who have never been expected to achieve a physical OUTCOME. Words they create, words they are judged by. If the speakers and listeners are both idiots, they could both be speaking gibberish and still support one another with respect to its value.
That is, in fact, done daily. Critical Race Theory is just the latest attack on the prosperity of African Americans. It won’t help any of them, and by dragging the nation down, it will most likely hurt them first and the most.
America was a much more sensible and prudent and sane nation when a much higher percentage of it grew up on farms and in small towns. I would even go so far as to say much of our virtue and success derives from the fact that so many of us were born into nothing but hard work, difficulty, sweat and grit.