While I was walking my son to school this morning we passed by a garbage truck making his morning rounds. Jacob wanted to stop and watch as the truck picked up the trash bin and dumped it into the truck. He thought it was way cool, like all little boys think, and like many he expressed a thought that maybe it would be fun to drive a trash truck.
Most parents probably do not want their kids to grow up to be trash haulers, fast food fry cooks, or custodians. We hope that our children will rise to something more 'substantial' (code: better paying), and it would be easy to try and dismiss those hopes by running down what some people do.
But I thought that this gave me an opportunity for a different kind of conversation on the rest of our walk. Yes, trash trucks are cool, but they also are a bit smelly, and there are other things I hope you will do someday. He seemed to accept that, but I decided to press on a bit further. I told him that I hoped he would do other things, but I also told him that picking up the trash is an important job. Who really wants to have trash sitting out in the streets for a long period of time? I also told him that people who work in restaurants are important, and if I had more time before I turned loose of him, I would have told him that we should also honor people who cut grass, clean school buildings, and make up hotel rooms.
Because all lives matter. All jobs are important. While as parents we hope for our children to do some things and not others, we must make sure they learn to respect people who do jobs that we ourselves do not want to do.
Recently I have seen a trend to 'elevate' some kind of jobs. Facebook posts reminding us that 'Police Lives Matter' (in response to some officer shootings). Yes, they do...but so do the people who a few bad police threaten, intimidate, injure, or kill because of an over-glorified view of their position. Then there are other posts griping about how fast food workers demand $15/hour while soldiers live in virtual poverty. Rather than take time to think that both have difficult and often undesirable jobs, we put the two 'classes' in conflict with one another instead of looking up at those who make millions pushing papers.
Maybe we need to recognize and affirm that all kinds of people matter, all kinds of job matter. Paul talked about the nature of the church in 1 Corinthians 12, how different kinds of giftedness does not give us an excuse to despise or cast off some we think are less important. It's the same way in society. We certainly don't pay him as much, but my garbageman matters just as much as the school superintendent. We might not want him making important decisions, but the guy who cleans my kids' school matters as much as the city manager. Because all lives matter.
