Nobody Owes you a Living

mail from a brother:

Below is a previous message I am re-posting, because I found a related quotation in a book I recently read.

Until the early 1980s, our family had a cattle ranch on a one thousand (1,000)-hectare pasture land in San Jose, Occidental Mindoro. First the rustlers, then the pest bungarngar, and finally the New People's Army (NPA) killed the industry in my home province. After revolutionary tax letters and threats on our ranch personnel, my father decided to bring our stock down. He tried cow fattening and set up a pig farm as well.

Now, as I work toward retirement, I am considering becoming a rancher or, as Brod put it when he and Sis visited with us here at the foothills of the Yosemite National Park a couple of years back, "So, you're coming home to become a gentleman farmer, Brod Mel?"

I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up. Just the same, I bought a book on "How to be a Cowboy" by Jim Arndt (2009, Gibbs Smith, 224 pages). On page 221 is a corollary to "Nobody owes you a living." From the quotable Will Rogers: "The more you know, the more you think someone owes you a living."

NOT.

My parents made sure, by their example, I knew how to work hard. With my father's last paycheck as a cook on an international commercial ship, Amang and Inang went into business and were able to provide -- and still are providing decades beyond the grave -- for their children. My parents were able to do so, because they did not know any better than to work hard all their lives.

Everybody is told nowadays not to work harder, but smarter. And now everyone's a smart aleck to think and expect entitlement -- whether or not one works for anything at all: neither hard or smart, but hardly anymore.

Thus, a provincial cattle industry was destroyed, and it served the middle class right.

Today, land is occupied, and squatters expect to be paid. Revolutionary taxes are expected to be paid as well.

Before my last semester at the Divine Word Mission Seminary (Christ the King in Quezon City) in 1972, I spent summer in the company of SVD seminarians, including the priest-to-be Conrado Balweg. We would spend days and nights with the barrio folk, who organized a local chapter of the Free Farmers of the Philippines. Our extracurricular activity was called a teach-in.

Using my own background as example: My parents were hardly nouveau riche, and my family was hardly ripe to become old money, and already every community of the nation was being overrun by people who, as Mr. Rogers (not quite but almost of the Sesame Street neighborhood) put it, and I paraphrase, "The more they know (having learned things from those teach-ins), the more they think someone owes them a living."

I may be a capitalist's son, but my sympathies always have been with the least of God's children. Those sympathies could be misconstrued and, ultimately, might be misplaced. Only another of Jesus Christ's teaching rights it for me: "Give back to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's."

In my mind, there should be no power struggle when our concerns are compartmentalized into Caesar's (legitimate government) and God's (service to humanity). No power struggle means peace and order, because everyone respects the rule of law.

Will Rogers also said, "You don't climb out of anything as quick as you fall in." Nevertheless, it is not too late for the old country if all Filipinos bring their hardest and smartest work to the same table.

Finally, Mr. Rogers of the right neighborhood likewise said, "No man is great if he thinks he is," and most famously, "I never met a man I didn't like." These quotations mean to me, as follows:

If I were to come home to become a gentleman farmer, but some "great" townsfolk (least likely homegrown and most likely taught in) have decided they have no use for another gentleman farmer, would I even want to meet anyone who couldn't like me in the first place?

Wit, Will's or anybody's, will only work if all fully participating citizens are willing to work toward one nation under God (to borrow from the American pledge of allegiance).

That, to me, is everybody's nobly legitimate service to humanity.

Thank you all for all you do.