The Miseducation of Me

Yesterday, I started working as a clerk at the public library. In a library, organization is very important. Things are classified a certain way and need to be kept accordingly so they can easily be located when needed. When something slips through the cracks of the obsessive structure of order, due to human error or subterfuge, it is tracked down and the situation is cleanly rectified.

Having studied post-colonial and vernacular English Literature, Gender Studies, and Philosophy in college, I am not trained to put things in a preordained order. I'm trained to question order. I'm trained to analyze, deconstruct, and reassess as exhaustively as possible and I am trained to defend as innovative a reassessment as I possibly can.

I wasn't really made for that sort of training. I'm a South Asian immigrant, I am a Muslim, I am a woman, and I am poor. College was a training that mostly sees the world for its disorder and dissonance. Despite the questioning of order, believe it or not, it is hard to avoid Western, patriarchal*, elitist values, since they are the values that get an American college its credibility. I at least attended a Catholic University that wore its Christian values on its sleeve and did not worship secularism.

While college helped me see my place in society, which I had previously felt I was lacking and that I needed to work hard and be creative to earn, it is a place in society where I increasingly feel like I am trespassing, a place I cannot earn no matter how hard I work. But it's a place that is rightfully mine. My college degree mostly made me painfully aware of the possibility that I struggle in futility. This is not something I am willing to easily accept.

Questioning order is infinitely constructive for the privileged, for people that order benefits. But of course they are the least likely to do so. That leaves it for those who order has forsaken. But after a certain point, for those that order has forsaken and has left to question it, all order becomes an enemy, life becomes meaningless and their questions become a threat to no one but themselves. This becomes a sort of order itself, created and supported by human error and subterfuge. It is unsettling to realize that you are not of the former group, though you've been a confident, straight "A" student your whole life, when you are in the middle of college.

I have to believe that order can be good. I have to see it. When a library patron is scanning a shelf that I ensured was organized, when someone comes in for something and I know exactly where it is, when I can learn from my mistakes rather than feel like everything I do is a mistake, it helps me feel that I can earn my place as a positive aspect of a constructive order.

Obviously, I don't think the objective way that libraries are ordered is a way that people can be ordered because people are not objects and what is just for objects is not just for subjects. Order should contain justice because a belief in order requires a belief in justice. This belief in justice is apparent in religion, and so religion has been called "The opium of the masses," and "slave mentality," Marx and Nietzsche respectively, for it's support of unjust order through a belief in cosmic justice. But that's what's called "blaming the victim," in my book, and it's ridiculous to blame disenfranchised people who can empower themselves by believing in any greater order.

So as it turns out, not all minimum wage jobs are soul-crushing.



*You can be a patriarchal feminist. You probably are one if you think matriarchal societies and lesbians are all feminists. Chew on that now.