You Don’t Want to Work on a Farm and I Don’t Either, But Urban Farming Could Change That Perception
by Laugh at Stephen Colbert If You Want To, I Think that Some of Us Would Farm If We Had To, Just Not in the Country Away from the Action.
Thanks to Stephen Colbert and a number of articles on farm work we now know what we already know, and that is that most Americans do not want to work out in the fields. So when someone says “I’ll take any job”, make a wager with them for $20 that they won’t last a day out in the fields doing back breaking hard labor. I can almost guarantee you that you will get that $20 back, and if you’re lucky, they’ll actually last long enough on the job to earn the $20.
Who actually works on farms these days? It is not that all of the individuals that work the farm are illegal immigrants, but it would seem that the vast majority of them are. We always talk about day laborers and getting paid underneath the table, but to read the article that I have referenced your average American does not even know how to do that job right. Some would say that we have become a nation that is soft, effeminate, that does not know how to earn our keep and would not know what to do without technological advances. Perhaps we have become too reliant on technology, to be completely honest, I haven’t seen a typewriter in over 20 years and if I write with a pen or a pencil my hand starts to hurt after twenty minutes.
Much is made of the fact that the African-Americans who would do this work refuse to do so because most African-Americans now live in highly urbanized areas in which there is no point to doing this type of work. However, as African-Americans moved to the Midwest and the Northeast many were stuck in factories doing hard, repetitive labor. Your average African-American that moved up North found work on an assembly line that was just as hard as any work he would have ended up doing in the South. These days many African-Americans have returned to the South to work in fields such as medicine, computer technology or even biotechnology. So we left the South to go the North for blue collar jobs, and then left the North to go to the South for white collar jobs.
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