Jobs that I Want II

That posting on jobs that I want didn't really go anywhere a while back. I think that posting was my lamest. But I'm still getting the hang of this blog thing. I was at Eliza's family home in Kansas the past few days, and spent some time with her parents, Stan & Sheila. Sheila used to be a librarian.

Plus, driving around town with Eliza, we saw the new Johnson County Libary in Kansas (maybe in Overland Park). It's beautiful, and it was nice to reflect on a place that values it's library system, and public institutions more generally. It reminded me of a cheesy movie I watched on TV a few weeks back, The Librarian, with ER dude Noah Wyle. It's basically, as the caption to one of the Wyle photos describes it, a lightweight Indiana Jones.

But there is something romantic about having a job about the pursuit of knowledge. Now I am a community organizer, and few (really none in my opinion) jobs could be more important, but sometimes I ask myself the "what if" questions. For people committed to social justice, the question really is: In a society replete with oppression and injustice, do I have a moral responsibility to spend my time doing something that challenges that injustice in the most strategic manner, or not? Naturally my answer is yes.

But what if we lived in a world with less injustice? Wouldn't it be fun to be a librarian, or professor, or writer then? I think so.

I should note that I went to a competitive small liberal arts school in the midwest, where huge numbers of people thought about social justice issues, and huge numbers went on to grad school. I myself was politicized deeply by the LA riots of 1992, and that experience, coupled with many others, propelled me on a path that led to community organizing. Many of my peers didn't absorb the same sense of duty, of responsibility to work as directly for social justice. I am frustrated by this, though my judgementalism has diminished in the 12 years since college. But why didn't more people see it as I did?