The Direction of Intention

105.
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I was desperate. It was the early 1980’s and I was just out of college. I’d moved to Louisville, KY to support my girlfriend who’d been accepted in to The Actor’s Theatre apprentice program. I’d been looking for jobs for weeks. The economy crashed a few months before we moved and many of the local factories had closed. I stood in lines for hours to fill out a single application. Day after day I was turned down, not because I was young, stupid, and inexperienced; I was turned down because I had a college degree. Day after day I heard, “You have a degree. You’ll want too much.”

I was surviving by doing odd jobs, mostly unloading mattresses from semi-trucks delivering them to warehouses. I painted a house. I worked for a contractor busting concrete, raking leaves. We were living on Ramen noodles and some vegetables. It turns out that I was not the great provider.

The day I actually begged for a job was the day I stopped looking. I saw an ad in the paper and drove immediately to the address. The job was (this is not a lie) to be the guy at the monster truck show that wears a gorilla suit and throws a Frisbee for a dog. I like dogs. It required travel and since my girlfriend was tired of Ramen noodles and my inability to support her, I thought some travel might be good for our relationship.

I was the only applicant and I didn’t get the job. The guy behind the desk said, “You know Shakespeare and stuff. You’re over qualified.” So I begged. I told him that I could pretend to not know Shakespeare and stuff. It didn’t matter. I knew too much. I was educated so I’d want more.

What mattered is that I heard it; I finally heard it. To want too much was not acceptable in the workforce. To survive, to work, to eat and have shelter, I had to be less. I had to pretend to be less. Education, to my prospective employers, made me a pariah. Or, I had to become one of the people in management that would require the people working for me to be less. Either way, I couldn’t do it. I would never again beg to wear a gorilla suit and promise to pretend to not know Shakespeare.

It is upside down.

I still like dogs. And, I am certain that the point of education is to make you want more, know more, be more, see more, explore more – and help others do the same. I’m also certain that the current test crazed system of education must be designed and driven by management, why else would we invest in a system designed to prepare people to dull themselves, to expect less.

I wonder what kind of community we might become if the opposite idea was the expectation?

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