Cat Videos Had to Watch Themselves
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
Gosh yes. The true engines of any society are those who know what hard work is. We can see that when productivity has decreased in the workforce, so has society standards.
My dad would wake 5am 6 days a week to work in scorching and/or cold weather (dependant on the season) on a building site. He would take us kids (boy or girl didn’t matter) onto the job site to work during our school holidays. I recall whilst I was looking for work whilst I was engage, Dad employed me to help him on the job site – paint timber, bring building materials to him, hold things whilst he hammered or drilled or staple gunned…I recall how tiring it was but he did it for over 55 years. Not a day off. God Bless him. I learnt grit and hard work from him.
Hard work sanctifies you.
Amen, Ezabelle. Good old Saint Benedict had the right idea- pray and work.
Both my grandfathers were truckers at at least one point in their careers.
For thr most part, if they weren’t booking crazy hours on the road they were working one or more part-time jobs in thier off hours.
Kinda funny. I stare at a screen for a living (designing industrial equipment) now and make pretty good money, but I still feel that the job I was most proud of was a part time job over the summer years ago driving a box truck…
In modern society, not everyone can have work that is easily connected to an end good. Things are just so complex! But all honest work is tied to a good whether in its unseen end or in its being pursued honestly.
Similarly, my daily spiritual work looks poor next to priests and religious, but so long as I approach it honestly and complete the small tasks set before me, my labors are cannot be useless.
This is not an excuse for dishonest work or work toward an end that is known to be bad, just encouragement for those of us who can’t always point to the good accomplished by our 9 to 5.
I WISH they were watching cat videos. The chat groups they are finding would have gotten any employee at a decent company fired
Am a recent DoD retiree who has looked forward to Pres Trump’s reduction of wasteful govt spending. But the DOGE “move fast and break things” path to downsizing won’t result in a lean and efficient workforce. And It’s hard to witness the lack of respect shown to so many hard working people – and YES, the majority of federal employees are dedicated and hard working (belying the stereotype implied by the above post title).
Would love to see DOGE focus on closing down unneeded programs, contracts, etc.; and then working with agencies to surgically reduce the workforce via established OPM processes.
This Catholic is praying for a little sanity.
“…and YES, the majority of federal employees are dedicated and hard working (belying the stereotype implied by the above post title). …”
Hmmm….. Much as I’d like to agree with that assessment, ..I can’t entirely. During my time in the military, especially my last tour, …I had some soul-searching to do.
Don’t get me wrong, I worked with lots of talented, energetic, dedicated, thoughtful people. Trouble is, …organizationally, we did frequently keep programs just small enough in size and cost so to avoid need for constant Congressional oversight.
True, we had quite a lot going on, having Congressional staff constantly looking over our shoulders to ensure we didn’t waste money would have created an intense administrative burden. Trouble is, precisely because we avoided having programs of that size and cost, we probably wound up doing lots of things which …well, maybe they needed done, maybe they didn’t.
Maybe they needed done, yet would have been better accomplished by a different Department of government from ours, or at least, it would’ve been better if a different Department had provided the funding and resources for this and that.
Congress could have changed the funding levels required, true. …I have seen and heard nothing since my years there to make me think they have or will.
Thus, I think that DoGE will be a necessary step, even if painful for some time. We’ve had the better part of a century for some Departments to have accrued… stuff. Much as I’d like to be able to take a scalpel to everything, …I don’t think that’ll work politically. If you can find a half-baked reason to keep THIS program here at least partly funded, …you can find an even more half-baked reason to keep THAT one funded too. …And thus your entire cost-cutting effort falls flat.
Better to start over as much as possible.
Congress will still need to Act eventually, else the next President will certainly have ability to “rebuild the Swamp” from whatever we take down.
No argument there,John. My concern is for those dedicated workers whom Americans ridicule as lazy, cat-video watchers; and probationary workers who were fired with a boiler-plate email that stated their perf was subpar (even though they had received fully satisfactory perf evals to date).
The firings are necessary, as part of eliminating organizational bloat. But adding insult to injury? No need for that.
Praying for God to grant wisdom on those evaluating the cuts;and to grace those of us not affected to have some compassion for those who are.
Mary,
I get it, yet I think you’re being very… optimistic. ..Or needlessly pessimistic.
I don’t believe anyone has been fired by generic email. They’ve been requested to respond. People will, I gather, be dismissed mostly if they don’t respond. Such request has gone out over nationwide radio (and TV), so nobody should be caught off guard. I believe part of the requirement has been relaxed too, so that employees may respond to their own Department, not exclusively to DoGE. Also, …I’ve never held a job for which we didn’t expect review. Even in the military, we still had to receive an annual evaluation. A few bullet points about one’s activities last week, …are not unprecedented.
We’ve been hearing quite a lot of …uh …hysterics(?) lately. Many people, mostly prominent Democrat politicians or their media advocates, have been going ballistic since Trump’s inauguration over… not much. I will hope that most of them have been acting primarily for dramatic effect. If not, …it mostly demonstrates how supervision within the federal government has become very lax indeed.
I don’t expect anyone to be Superman within the federal government. ..I also don’t expect to be required to tolerate Lex Luthor running amok with my tax dollars.
The idea that has been utterly lost in the federal workplace is that you work for the Executive Branch. That power rests in one individual – the President. For better or for worse, he is the CEO. So Trump, I stead of celebrating National Peanut Day and campaigning is actually acting like an executive. Good.