upward mobility through the generations

I am convinced that if the world loved God more, there would be more farmers.

People all over the world started out as agriculturalists at the primal level. Even in the Americas, natives had crops and harvested and directly interacted with their food sources. Before they ate the food, they tilled the ground, planted, and harvested. There was so much labor behind a single grain of corn, a single berry.

Today I go to the grocery store and I pick out what I like. I unwrap it from the wrapper and eat it. There is no preparation. I am commended for my ability to purchase this food, because I "worked long hours to be able to obtain the food."

In reality, I work from my computer. Most of my work is responding to emails from my apartment. It can be a headache, but really, it's pretty low-stress and labor-limited.

When Europeans arrived in Jamestown, they spent too much time playing bowling in the streets and suffered from lack of food. They could've just farmed. Instead they wasted time going out on adventures and all that.

This attitude of "less work, more pay" has been passed down through the generations. Unions originally formed to do righteous, awesome things. Now they sometimes exploit their power. Minimum wage keeps increasing.

Yet, few of us do sustainable jobs. The amount of farmers in our country has gone from 99% to about 2%. These farmers are even subsidized by the government, which really harms foreign competitors and systematically keeps people around the globe, the real hard workers, in poverty.

Well this summer, I really want to dig. Actually, I don't really want to, because I'm told that it is a demeaning job. It's been indirectly pounded into me. My culture says that a reputable person is not a farmer. It's for hillbillies. Yet it is probably one of the most revolutionary and helpful acts a human being can do. We complain about immigrants coming in to do migrant agriculture in America, yet we sit behind desks and get paid for browsing the web. Getting paid for that sounds more irrational than giving physical labor to people that will actually do it.

I want not just to taste my food, but to know it. I want to truly believe that work is freedom, as radicals of the past have claimed. But I cannot believe this until I become it. Just because I'm living in a society that has become so upwardly mobile through the generations does not mean that I should conform to the pattern of that society. Perhaps less pay and more work is the path to freedom.