On College Kids and Kindness
A kid came to my house yesterday trying to sell books. I say kid but he was college age, from Estonia, a former Soviet-bloc country on the Baltic Sea. This brought up several questions, starting with:
How does a 20 year old from Estonia end up selling books door-to-door in Kansas?
and progressing to:
Why does a 20 year old from Estonia end up selling books door-to-door in Kansas?
The first question has to do with logistics: how did he even find the job? How badly does he need money? Is he being exploited, because this sounds like a really, really shitty job?
The second question is about desire, because it was 90 degrees the day he came to the door, which isn’t even hot yet for Kansas. In a month it’ll be 107, hot enough to hurt. Hot enough to make you hate people, and this college kid from Estonia will be walking door to door trying to sell shit people don’t want. Most people will be polite, like we were, but some people will slam the door in his face. Maybe tell him to move along. Maybe tell him to fuck off.
This made me think about the worst job I ever had, pouring concrete during an Arkansas summer circa 1993. I was 21 and didn’t want to move back home between college semesters, so I took the job in construction, thinking it would build character. I’d work hard all summer and be proud of myself at the end, with money in my pocket to pay for the things I needed, which is what America is all about. Good work for good pay, and all that American Dream stuff.
But the job was long and hard and hot enough to make me hate people, and in the end I didn’t feel like I had accomplished anything. I worked and went back to college the next semester, but I never felt good about it. The job paid $6 an hour, and the money I made working all summer covered only a quarter of my tuition. I wrote an essay about it a long time ago and I’ll include it at the end of this post, but the bottom line is that hard work is hard, and hard work for little pay is both demoralizing and devastating. It also runs counter to that American Dream those of us who grew up here have heard about all our lives.
This brought me back to the kid going door to door in the Kansas heat. Knocking and waiting politely only to find people uninterested in what he had to sell. They would politely shut the door, because this is Kansas and I’d like to think no one is rude enough to slam the door, but when you’ve just gotten home from work and the kids are crying or the yard needs mowing or dinner is almost done, you tend not to care about the foreigner bothering you with educational material you don’t want to buy.
Standing there on the front stoop the kid was sweating. Jenn refilled his bottle of water and we talked to him and tried our best to ease his suffering, but it made me think of all the shitty jobs out there, and all the people who suffer through them. The cashiers working the nightshift in convenience stores. The single-mom nurse pulling double-shifts so their kid might go to college one day. The farmers and field hands bent over in the summer heat, the construction workers pouring concrete. The fry cook making minimum wage, coming home with grease splatters all over his good shoes.
The truth is life is hard for a lot of people. I keep thinking about waking morning after morning, knowing the day will be difficult and at the end of it you won’t have much to show for it, which is the problem with a lot of work in this country—people don’t have anything to show for it at the end of a long, hard day.
I believe we have lost empathy for others in this country. I believe we are clinging to an image of America as it used to be and not what it is now, which is a place where it’s hard to get by. Where jobs don’t pay enough to make ends meet because there was a stock buyback and the CEO got a 5 million dollar bonus. Where that frycook works 29 hours a week because at 30 hours he becomes eligible for health insurance and McDonald’s doesn’t want to pay. Where a college professor can adjunct for 20 years and barely get by while teaching at a university with a 300 million dollar endowment and students who go straight to Wall Street.
Most importantly, I believe we don’t notice the struggle other people go through. Every night on the news I hear the talking heads talk politics without talking about people. I see college kids from other countries coming to America in the hope of reaching that dream, finding out it only exists for a few at the top.
Among the rest are those for whom the struggle is day to day. I haven’t even mentioned the people with anxiety. With ADHD or depression. With cancer or long Covid. Those who have recently lost someone or about to lose someone and now have to rise up in the morning to go to work when they aren’t even sure they still want to be alive. I have come to believe all of us are struggling in some small way, whether we realize it or not, and we could all use a kind word or a helping hand, or just someone to fill a bottle of water on a hot day in Lawrence Fucking Kansas.
In other words, be kind, friends. Be so damn kind anger is afraid of you.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Paul’s Newsletter to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.