Western Civilization and Sliced Bread

A few years ago I was watching election coverage on a cable channel and a panel were discussing election results. One of the panelist was a member of Congress named Steve King whom I believe is from Nebraska.  Someone asked King a question about minorities and he pointed out that the greatest thing to happen to native Americans & Africans and even the rest of the world was being introduced to western civilization.
          He went on to say that the persons of color who occupy 75% of the planet would effectively be backward savages had they not been enlightened by benevolent Europeans who brought them culture and technology. The rest of the panel sat stunned as if he'd just publicly relieved himself on the desk at which they sat. One of the fellow panelists asked "You don't honestly believe that do you?" He said that every major invention had come from Europe of people of European dissent and he could think of no BETTER civilization. There was an awkward silence and in that brief silence part of me wished that someone would have walked up to him and caved in the back of his skull with a mace.

               it's been said that "winners write the history books" and given that I live in a country founded BY western Europeans it stands to reason that every history I read prior to attending college was told from the point of view of the western European who felt it was his DESTINY to rule a country that covered a continent. It spoke of the indigenous people who lived on the land as "hostile" and treated them as "obstacles" to progress.  In passing it mentioned small pox depleting their numbers and Americans killing buffalo for sport until their numbers dwindled.  It mentions slavery ONLY in the context of a civil war but barely mentions the people of color who were slaves on tobacco, cotton, rice and sugar plantations from the days of British colonialism until the end of a civil war fought by those who wanted to ensure the right to own them extended for all eternity.
              My history books barely MENTIONED the Jim Crow laws written in the 1870s which remained on the books until I was a high school senior in 1988.

       
             When I studied the WORLD'S history in college I learned that Africa had NOT been a bunch of cannibals with plates in their lips who ate white explorers in pith helmets, but vibrant civilizations like Zimbabwe, the Egyptians, Cush, Sheba, Ethiopia & Mali. I learned about 14th century King Mansa Musa who was said to have been the wealthiest man who ever lived. A legend says that when he made a haj to Mecca his caravan gave away and spent so much gold in tribute that he collapsed several small economies.  I learned about Africans trading in gold and diamonds and metal foundries in Zimbabwe which predate anything in Europe but that never made most of the history books I'd read before.
           I learned of people in central and western Africa who invented farming techniques that were exploited in the United States when their descendants were sold into slavery and brought to the Carolinas. In high school I'd never heard Mansa Musa's name and the only African kingdom I'd heard of was the Egyptians, but the history I learned said that they were Europeans. Truthfully Alexander the Great took over Egypt and the Ptolemaic Greeks DID eventually rule Egypt, but the original Egyptians did NOT have fair skin. I read about the European "dark ages" after the collapse of the Roman Empire" and the renaissance which came about to rise from it, but don't remember ever reading about a "dark age" anywhere in Africa or Asia.
 
             I learned about the great civilizations of Mesopotamia, India, China, Vietnam, Korea and Japan and how when the Chinese invented gun powder they initially refused to use if for military applications as they considered it too inhumane. I learned about Indians inventing the concept of "zero" and Islamic scholars devising Algebra. I learned about how mechanical clocks and paper were invented in China, (papyrus had existed in Egypt centuries earlier) and at the time Europeans still used sun dials.
                I learned of the civilizations of the Americas which had languages written in glyphs. I read about some native cultures who had systems of government not unlike direct democracies which had councils.

           The purpose of this piece is NOT to speak ill of western civilization, to paint it as one of conquest or anything of the sort, but merely to point out that HAD Europe simply traded with Africa, Asia & America the way they traded with one another, that the world in which we live would be a much different place. We wouldn't have random "Supremacists" who were brainwashed to believe the patronizing, racist justification some had for Europeans plundering the world for her riches and that Kipling's "White Man's Burden"is just a poem written by a man who was born into a charmed existence in an "India" created by a British East India company for its executives who ruled with brutality as they took, tea, spices cotton and all they could from the conquered people whose culture they denied had defeated the armies of Alexander the Great centuries earlier.

The Apprenticeship...

When I was growing up my dad didn't believe in the concept of an "allowance". He told me at a very early age that in the real world people only gave you money if you did something to earn it.  My dad was a paint contractor so he figured I could learn HIS trade.

           From the age of nine whenever I needed money I put on my painters whites and earned money as I learned the construction arts of dry wall installation, painting and applying wall paper. Dad's deal was pretty straight forward, initially he paid me minimum wage, but eventually my salary went up as time went on.  I spent part of every summer, many weekends and sometimes some evenings doing jobs with my father.  The summer of 1985 he came to me with a deal I couldn't pass up as he wouldn't give me a choice.  There was a HUGE job at a hotel that was coming up and it paid more than he did. Dad's jobs were small commercial properties like strip malls and office parks but mostly residential. Residential was dad's bread and butter. This was different, he wasn't the contractor on this one, he was just another guy applying wall paper and he'd gotten me a job as an "assistant".
         
           There were only two painters assistants on this job and our job was to sandpaper dry wall and later to clean up excess plastic tarps and wasted wall paper.  The other "assistant" was the supervisors son. Unlike myself he showed no enthusiasm for the job. He was a quiet blond kid who had a permanent look of disinterest on his face.  It was a large building and there were several crews operating at once on different floors. I mentioned to the boss' son that if we separated we could get more done, that is I'd take the odd floors and he the even. He dismissed that idea and said that the day would go by faster if we worked together.
        
         Initially I thought I'd made a new friend,  but then I realized that aside from being the same age and on the same job, we had absolutely NOTHING in common.  We had no conversations of substance. He didn't want to talk about music, girls, politics, school or anything other than the car he wanted to buy how drunk he liked to get, how much weed he could smoke without his dad finding out and when we were either going to lunch OR getting off work. I soon realized WHY he didn't want to work apart from me. When we were "working" I was doing the lion's share of it.  He did as little as possible and only seemed to want to work as hard as I was when he saw his father on the periphery.  He did that act once when I stopped to go to the bathroom and his father showed up, he pretended that he had done all the work on our floor and of course who do you think his father believed. Other painters would later come to my defense but it was still a pain.
       
               I was on this job for a month before they told us that most of the hard work was done and they didn't need two assistants anymore. Guess which one of us was let go? Here's a hint, it wasn't the blond kid with the casual work ethic. I took the money I made and saved it for school clothes and didn't give the job a second thought until two weeks later when my dad told me that the supervisors son had quit.  Supposedly he told his father that he'd gotten tired of being on the site and that it bored him.  I laughed because I knew that he finally had to do some work for a sustained period of time and didn't have someone else for whose efforts he could take credit. He had to sink or swim and sank.

           I worked harder than he did and we made the same money, but when he had to do exactly what I'd been doing for a month he folded like a card table. Maybe he was smarter than I am. He figured out that all he had to do was show up and do the bare minimum and he'd still get paid.  He even took three "sick days" which he informed me were days when he was "sick of working." Whether he was a con artist or a malingerer I'll never know but he taught me three valuable lessons that summer: 1. Hard work is good for one's self esteem as you're either going to take pride in what you do or quit.  2. It's not WHAT you know, but WHOM and 3 and this was the most important lesson, every lie ever told eventually is exposed. You can only maintain subterfuge for so long before it's ultimately discovered and you're revealed as a fraud.
                  Regardless of my opinion of my former "co-worker" (I use that term ironically) he did at least show up on a job.  Little has changed as there are still young people working on summer jobs, but many more who simply wait for mom and dad to hand them what they want. I can't help but wonder, when did an entire generation stop equating work with rewards?