Being Direct

I was reading an article about a guy who made up a t-shirt to explain who he is. The T-shirt says simply, 'I'm not angry. I'm from Philly'. Having grown up Blue collar in a suburb of Los Angeles I also get this completely. My father was an Electrical Contractor and from age 12 to 17 I worked summers for my father and in my junior year in High school I worked the 4-4 plan which meant I went to four periods of classes and worked for my father 4 hours each day during the  week. Though I had to take a History class during the summer I got paid and didn't have to take a gym class in my Junior Year. This allowed me to have plenty of money for traveling on weekends and dating and surfing and Scuba diving(all of which I loved a lot then).

But being around tradesmen all the time there was always a lot of swearing and directness. Your word was your bond and if you didn't follow through you could expect a fist in your mouth and missing teeth. I liked this direct way of functioning and came to despise the office world of backbiting and deceit when I had to face that in my twenties. I always knew exactly where I stood with blue collar working men. With white collar people you didn't always know where you stood and had to be prepared to be metaphorically stabbed in the back at any time. And in a white collar environment calling someone on their lies or deceit usually only meant the end of that career for you. So, my solution was to quit a job and move on when I found back stabbers(metaphorically).

I refused to give up my direct style of communication that I had learned from my father and the tradesmen that I worked with and around. But as I became more sophisticated I became more aware of who I was around and what their values were. And I learned the art of making conversation and what to talk about and what not to talk about and when to be completely quiet.

So, I learned that some people live in a world of lies and therefore only deserve a sort of complacent double speak from you because if you told them the direct truth it would be dangerous. But all this sophistication took time.

It's not that blue collar people are all nice. That's not the point. Blue collar is about realizing that life is a physical battlefield and if you aren't strong enough you will be mowed down one way or the other. Whereas being white collar is all about game playing and role playing which many blue collar people never master.

So, because I have always been very intelligent like my father I moved out of the blue collar environment and into a more elite world. But I'm still a blue collar populist in my heart. Because all this elitism though nice to be around in many ways doesn't really suit me in my heart.

So, recently I was channel surfing on Cable TV and found "It's always Sunny in Philadelphia", which is about people working at a bar in Philadelphia. It has a more off beat kind of set than "Cheers" and Danny De Vito is in it. But I found I felt at home with an east coast version of the kind of people I knew growing up in Los Angeles in the 1950 and early 1960s. By the 1970s I had become much more sophisticated and moved away from Los Angeles to San Diego then Mt. Shasta, Then Hawaii etc. but I never forgot my roots or my friends who had to go to the Viet Nam War. I didn't have to go because I was in college but many of my friends weren't that lucky. Being direct in the end is where the rubber meets the road. I can pilot a plane but you can't stay in the air all the time. There's just too much weather.