Am I Walking The Wrong Path

In my reading about Henry Thoreau, Ellery Channing, Bronson Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson and others of the like, I can't help but wonder if I am walking the wrong path. For years now I have been trying to get another writing gig however, it has not happened. I've been turned down for one reason or another even when a couple of publications asked for me to write something. One magazine even sent out a photographer for a photo shoot and I was assured my article would be in their spring issue; never happened. This is not the only thing I am in wondering about.

This line from Walter Harding in his book about Henry Thoreau caused me pause, he wrote: "Even those who had cold-shouldered him and denounced him for years as a ne'er -do-well began beating a path to his door with birds' nests or flowers or Indian relics in their hands and questions on their lips." Now my birds' nests and flowers and Indian relics are not the same as Thoreaus were but instead other more modern birds' nests flowers and Indian relics. I do abhor when a third party asks a question on a problem which is put to me and I don't even get the credit. Such is life and you learn to live with it. Sort of like working for someone else earning a meager wage while the employers reap all the rewards. Your working and sweating and making things happen and the owners are buying new cars, homes, planes, boats and going on several vacations each year. You the worker make the industries hum with your back breaking labors hoping to get noticed and move up in the company while the owners green behind the ears kids get it all without earning it. They get it only because they are...well because they are their kids. I left a company just like that after over a decade of service because of something just like that, only the kids friends were put in higher positions right off the street because, as you guessed it, they were friends of the kid.

Bronson Alcott was before his time in the ways of learning and teaching in several schools of his day. He was introducing students to science and music and other subjects that were considered useless at the time. These ideas he had was one of the biggest problems of his being able to hold a job. The powers that be thought these things to be less important. They were more of today's thinking of the "NO child left behind" program in schools today. As long as the students pass the tests nothing else matters. These are false results as these kids today are not really being taught anything other than what is crammed in for test time. You see, Alcotts ideals came of age and now it is being shelved yet again. Not every child is geared to be the owner of a large company, or a boss, lawyer or Doctor and so on. Our school system is teaching that unless you procure a large salary job then you are less, nothing, nobody and loser.
It turns my stomach that most of these kids in college are there for only one thing. That is to party, drink, live large, pretend to be all that and independent all on mothers and fathers dime. It's play time to put off what is heading towards scores of them like a steamroller of reality when mom and dad are not there to pick up the tab any longer. They feel it is beneath them to do any actual laborious job. They all want to be living in the big fat house driving the big fat cars with the big fat paychecks. They don't give a darn that most their parents mortgaged their homes, stole into their savings and did without so the kid could be an uppity man/daughter of the world. These kids expect to go into a job at the top not working their way up with actual work.

This is not anything new as it was the same when Alcott and Thoreau were teaching in the 1800's. Most of what Thoreau himself was being taught at Harvard he found useless to large degree. The reasons above are likened to those days of long ago past teaching criteria that led Thoreau, and others like him to start they're own short lived schools. Thoreau himself could not find employment long in others schools so he struck out on his own. He took kids out into the fields and woods to teach many times real world lessons.

Most people today just put to much into having possessions, bigger, better, newer stuff to put in their bigger better homes. Things that keep them working harder and longer to keep up with others around them. Debt, debt and more debt. Spending has it rewards but not for the card holder. I wonder if they know their trying to keep up with the Jones' who are trying to keep up with the Smiths' to not be outdone and it's all an illusion.

I think I need a walk in the woods.