I have a confession to make: I was a lazy child. I'm not proud of it, but it may have been a blessing in disguise, for it informs my understanding that this world - and yes, even our dear United States - is fundamentally unfair. Put simply, I really have no business being successful and happy.
First, a little history. When I hit about fourth grade, I stopped doing my homework. Having been a teacher, I know that some kids do not do their homework because they do not understand it, some because they have busy after school lives and don't prioritize it, and some do not do it for the mere fact that they are lazy. I was solidly in the latter category, a trend that continued up through high school. In my defense at the time, I hated school. Thus, in all my adolescent maturity, it stood to reason that I should not be forced to do things that I do not actually enjoy doing. In addition, I was blessed with a solid capacity to memorize a great deal of information in a short period of time, and to then remember that information at least through the next day. Thus the time in high school drama class when I neglected learning my monologue until the night before - ironic, since that is something which I enjoyed, but by that time my laziness was well-ingrained.
This also made cramming for tests fairly standard, though of course I learned little. I remember once when I wrote an essay on the influence of Irish immigrants on US history, and my teacher politely accused me of plagiarism because he had never seen me display any measure of effort or competency in anything, let alone a ten-page essay. But this all begs the question: why did I even cram for tests or write essays in the first place? What prevented my laziness from taking hold entirely? Part of the answer lies in the fact that certain tasks, like writing essays, appealed to me (go figure), and that, through a more-than-decent education, I had somehow acquired the skills to do so effectively. Even more fundamentally, though, is the fact of my parents. They may not have been able to sway me from willful mediocrity (and anyone who knows kids can hardly blame them), but even I had limits, and outright failure was not an option.
Of course, I also, as many young ones do, had an outsized view of my own abilities and wisdom. In that wisdom, I decided firmly that I would not go to college. Now, in my actual defense, this was not an act of laziness. I sincerely hated school, and had visions of making it in the world of socially conscious, indy hop hop. (Hmmm...maybe not such a solid defense after all.) In any case, my parents were having none of it. They insisted that I apply at least to one college, and by some stroke of luck I got in. Moreover, they so valued education and my future that they risked paying for me to go to college, despite my previous track record with education.
It was probably the single most important that anyone ever made for me. I flourished in college: I worked hard, earned a 3.8 overall GPA, and held a job in which I was working about 30 hours a week by the time that senior year rolled around. After college, I entered a volunteer teaching program and earned my Master's in education. I do not list these accomplishments to brag - quite the opposite, it's all pretty shameful to me. Though those who know me well know that there were several other bumps along the way - loss, grief, health issues, unemployment - they also know that I am extremely happy now, work hard at job that I am blessed to have, married to a wonderful woman, and that I recently bought a house.
In short, I may be going to Hell. How can I be in this position when I so willfully avoided success for so long? Moreover, any number of circumstances may have done me in: had my parents not been able to send me to good schools, be they elementary, high school, or university; had my parents not both been well-educated and valued education; had I not been born with certain intellectual gifts that helped me skate by; had one of my parents become unemployed or died while I was young - any number of events or realities could have derailed my success. And yet, things somehow turned out this way, nonetheless.
This may be the fundamental reason, then, that I do not buy the argument that anyone in this country can succeed through a little hard work. To be clear, while laziness should have done me in, I am not arguing that I think that the poor are lazy. Instead, I am pointing out that, primarily through luck of birth, I as an entirely non-exceptional student was protected from failure and ultimately able to succeed. We make much in this country of those exceptional people that pull themselves out of poverty as an example of the justice of it all, as do we of our own hard work and the ludicrous contention that any of us are successful due only to our own work ethic. Many people work hard their entire lives and seem to get nowhere. And, increasingly, the jobs that allowed immigrant groups to rise out of poverty are disappearing.
Take the example of my wife. She grew up in circumstances very different from my own - she grew up in a steel mill town, her parents migrated from Puerto Rico, her father found a grueling but steady job in the mills. She, in my mind, is an exceptional person both in intelligence and work ethic. She was able to get into and graduate from the University of Notre Dame with both a bachelor's and master's degree. But even she was fortunate enough to be blessed with a level of economic and familial security growing up that many around her did not have. (And where are all of those steel mill jobs going?)
So, when people tell me that hard work is all it takes, I cannot help but reflect on my own good fortune, as well as the good and misfortune of those whom I have met. When I worked in Birmingham, AL, with inner-city kids, I saw that many of them had behavior problems stemming from family situations, learning challenges stemming from a poor education, developmental challenges that we their teachers were not equipped to address, family members that had been killed or arrested, anger problems that they had not learned to resolve constructively, a willingness to learn that was often disrupted by the more troubled and troublesome students in the classroom, and language and writing issues that will likely severely limit the type of employment they can find, or what colleges, if any, would take them. Not to mention, of course, economic problems that would make attending college highly unlikely.
Many of their parents would frustrate me - those that didn't seem to value education; those that encouraged their children to resolve conflicts violently. I would find myself judging these people, blaming them for their children's behavior. But once I stepped back, I was able to reflect on what types of parents that the people before must have had, what type of challenges that they must have faced growing up, what types of challenges they now face. And it is because I know that I, as a non-exceptional person, may well have been beat down by these challenges, and because I know that it is only through circumstance that I had the opportunity and skills to succeed, that I cannot merely label others as not taking full advantage of a supposed abundance of opportunity.
I have had times in my adult life in which I have fought hard to transcend my circumstances, but I was only able to do so because for so much of my youth, my circumstances transcended me. I believe that people should work hard; I encouraged my students every day to become better writers, thinkers, and people. But I recognize that for even the brightest and hardest-working among them, the fight to transcend those circumstances will be grueling, disheartening, and yes, for a good number, potentially fruitless. I believe, though, that if those of us who are more fortunate care about the people we so easily could have been, that if we learn to love, respect, and listen to these people, that if we commit to working with, serving, and learning from these people, that we can address these injustices. Not because we feel sorry for them, not because we have any secrets to success that they merely need heed, but simply because they are human beings that deserve the same opportunities that we had, and because it is right. That was another thing, by the way, that I learned from my parents: love others and do what's fair and right.
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