It's mine to keep?

I've been asked to write about my Mrs. Job, and I will do that, but not today. Right now I'm having a very personal reaction to what I heard a young person say in a radio interview recently. "We are about to go to work," he said, "and we have a right to keep what we earn." This is a variant on, "I worked hard for what I have and I deserve to keep it." This tension between the personal and community, always there, is complex and exacerbated during a period of political controversy. I will refrain from doing the professorial thing of pontificating on these issues. I just want to talk about my own experience. 

The truth is, I have been pretty successful in my career, and I have worked very hard all along the way. At one point, back when my children were relatively young, I got annoyed with people's assumptions that college professors didn't work hard.  After all, they thought, we only had to show up in class a few times a week and talk. So I kept a minute by minute log of the time I put in during the week actually working at my paying job.  That didn't include time spent reading and studying stuff in my field.  It turned out that I was devoting 50 hours a week to my job.  And I still work, I'm happy to say, pretty much on my own schedule.  I do it because I don't want to stop, and because my success has not led to massive wealth. If I want to travel, I have to earn the money to do it.

But here's my point.  I did not do this hard work all by myself.  I grew up in a home where there were no cockroaches running regularly through my bedroom, nor were there rats nibbling at my toes. True, we did have a mouse in the house once -- a rare enough event that I remember it.  There were no gunshots forcing us to eat on the floor to escape the death that might come through our windows, and no toxic air making asthma inhalers common supplies in our school bags. I was free to walk the distance to the school bus stop without fear of being attacked, and, as far as I know, none of my friends fell victim to rape or incest. At the beginning of the school year I got new clothes and a new pencil box.  And I remember the thrill of the new crayons that were provided by the school system.

I was fortunate to have a mother and father with excellent parenting skills who encouraged my creativity and eagerness to learn, unbiased by the fact that I am a female.  More than that, I enjoyed their full financial support to attend Connecticut College (for Women at that time), a truly demanding college where academic excellence was encouraged, and partying was not.  I was even fortunate to attend college at a time when the institution acted in locus parenti, with the right to prevent self-destructive behavior on campus. I did work at the library and typing papers for classmates, and at various jobs in the summertime.  Most of my summers I worked at the Bristol Brass Corporation where my father was employed. I learned a lot from those jobs, and added to my personal funds. Perhaps most outstanding compared to today's graduates, I had no college loans to repay when I graduated. I was free just to move on to the next phase of my career.

Graduate school was next, and there my parents enhanced my earnings as a professor's assistant. Oh, let's not forget whoever it was who donated funds to Boston University that made it possible for them to grant assistantships and scholarships.  And I have to recognize the folks who had the courage to hire me, a woman, at a time when that was not so easy to do.

There's so much more that helped me, like access to good medical and dental care, and sufficient funds to eat healthily.  Besides all this, I lived in a nation and time when obstacles in my way were relatively minimal. So, what's my point? It really isn't all about me.  Sure, I worked hard, but that's not the entire reason for my success, or even the basic cause. I owe a huge debt to the community.

So, I just can't feel that I should get to keep it all because I worked hard for it.  I hope and believe that I have been rewarded for being a good steward of the gifts left in my care by community near and distant.