Self worth

The article ‘‘Finding your new self’’ (Timaru Herald, December 15) tends to suggest it is just a problem for ‘‘millenials’’. Not so.

Since I came to live in New

Zealand over half a century ago the two commonest opening gambits in a conversation are the rhetorical question ‘‘How are You?’’ and ‘‘What do you do for a crust?’’ Our work and our identity have ever been interwoven.

In 1953 I left school at 16 and went to sea. Forty men on 10,000 tonnes of iron in the middle of an ocean is a very basic world. I was quickly made aware that my sole value was if I could do my job – otherwise you were a passenger, the ultimate insult for a mariner. In the circumstances it made sense but in other such situations it can be overdone.

Your Wednesday editorial on ‘‘not calling in sick unless . . .’’ reflects the ultimate view that a worker is just an economic unit. Similar thinking takes ‘‘dole’’ as a dirty word.

This brings us to the personal aspect. An employer may hire and fire for good reason, but a government has to consider everyone as a member of society. It behoves all of us to consider anybody and everybody a person first and a worker second, especially in this unusual year when jobs have disappeared willynilly. Maybe it’s good practice for the future.

Politicians may talk of job creation but the reality is different. Technology is taking over jobs, the most striking instance is the car industry. Locally, 50 years ago up to 250 men worked at the Timaru port loading ships. Now it is a small fraction of that number. We may take pride in doing a job but the job should not define us. There is a spectrum of humanity from nice to nasty but everyone has worth.

This should be most in our minds at Christmas. It pays to remember the birth of Jesus was announced first to those on the fringe of society, the shepherds, through to foreign astrologers, a spectrum of humanity. God was no longer the personal possession of the Jewish people. Jesus was Emmanuel, God with (all of) us.

Having a job is one thing, but having hope is something else again. Employed or unemployed, Happy Christmas.

Dennis Veal

Timaru