What's It All About, Alfie?
People of a certain age will remember the song sung by Dionne Warwick from the opening line, “What’s it all about, Alfie?” composed by Hal David and Burt Bacharach which was inspired by the 1966 film “Alfie.” Here are the lyrics:
What's it all about, Alfie
Is it just for the moment we live
What's it all about when you sort it out, Alfie
Are we meant to take more than we give
Or are we meant to be kind
And if only fools are kind, Alfie
Then I guess it's wise to be cruel
And if life belongs only to the strong, Alfie
What will you lend on an old golden rule
As sure as I believe there's a heaven above, Alfie
I know there's something much more
Something even non-believers can believe in
I believe in love, Alfie
Without true love we just exist, Alfie
Until you find the love you've missed you're nothing, Alfie
When you walk let your heart lead the way
And you'll find love any day, Alfie
(Quote source here.)
I turned 14 half way through that year (1966). As I look back on the decades that have passed since that time, that question still lingers in the air, and even more so looking back over the two plus decades since this new century began.
This morning as I was reading a newsletter on Substack by Robert W. Malone, MD, MS, titled “Micro-Aggression and Cancel Culture,” I realized a connection it had with my own set of circumstances going back to the start of this century.
I spent over 20+ years working at colleges and universities that started back in September 1983 when, at the age of 31, I attended a state university to finish my bachelor’s degree; and my career in academia ended when it came to an unexpected end in April 2009 one month shy of my 57th birthday. I searched for another position in my professional field (Student Affairs) for over six years after that job ended in 2009, and every time I thought I was about to be hired, something stopped it from happening.
The irony is that up until I accepted that last position as a Director at a for-profit college in the fall of 2008 (it was my first and only foray into the for-profit sector of higher education—my previous work experiences were at non-profit colleges and universities), I never had a problem finding a job in my field. The Director position at the for-profit college only lasted seven months, but there was something about losing that job that left me virtually unemployable in trying to find a position from that point on, and I was still ten years away from normal retirement age. I was also single and self-supporting with no other means of income.
For the first two years of my job search, I had several excellent job interviews with search committees, and on one occasion, the Dean (who would have been my boss had I been hired) at a private nonprofit college told me after the interview process that I had the exact set of qualifications that she was looking for, and that she would be calling me very soon. However, I did not hear back from her which seemed very odd as she said I was her top candidate for the job.
My foray into the world of higher education which occurred back in 1983 came after working in the private sector primarily as a secretary. When my mother died in March 1983, her death was the impetus that spurred me on to go back to college and finish a bachelor’s degree at a state university. I spent two years finishing up my bachelor’s degree, and I worked as the editorial secretary for a professional journal housed at that university during that time. I loved working in the academic environment, but when I graduated in 1985, the editorship of that professional journal was moved to another state university, and I ended up finding a job as an assistant editor for a regional magazine unaffiliated with academia. It was not until the start of 1990 that I found myself back in the academic setting when, through a set of circumstances, I ended up returning to that state university, and I earned a master’s degree in 1991 in the area of higher education/student personnel services. I also worked in a graduate administrative assistantship during that time. After I graduated, I applied for a one-year doctoral fellowship at a private university in a different state, and I was the recipient of one of two fellowships awarded for the academic year of 1992-93.
At the end of that one-year doctoral fellowship, I ended up working for that same university on a project that was Federally funded until the grant funding ended in the fall of 1994. From that point on I worked at two private colleges and a state university in that same state until 2008, when the division I was working in at the time was dismantled, and I began a job search that ended when I was hired for the Director position at the for-profit college in a different state in the fall of 2008.
It was that Director position that ended seven months later in 2009 when I was 56 that brought my career to an end. Of course, I didn’t realize at the time that my career had ended. I spent the next six years in a major job search (the end result netting a big fat zero) before I was forced to take Social Security at the age of 62 in order to have any income again. I couldn’t even find part-time work in any field or type of business. It was as if the work world shut me out, and I had no clue why that happened. I had excellent annual evaluations, a solid work ethic, and stellar references.
It has now been 14 years since I lost that job in 2009, and I never did find another job. And that is what started me writing on my blog that I created on WordPress in the summer of 2010. It started off as an effort to understand why I couldn’t find work, but after the first year I gave up on that topic, and it turned into what is now over 800 posts on a variety of topics written from a Christian perspective, and I am still publishing on it.
Regarding Dr. Malone’s article that I mentioned at the start of this post titled “Micro-Aggression and Cancel Culture,” he quotes from an article in The Epoch Times titled, “Former Principal Loses Superintendent Job For Calling Women ‘Ladies’”. The title by itself tells the story, and it’s a story of how easily and quickly someone can lose their job here in America because of a prevailing climate that has entered our culture over the past several decades that seems to have grown since the beginning of the 21st Century, and it escalated during the Covid-19 pandemic that started three years ago. Looking back, I discovered that I began experiencing shades of it at a university I worked at from 2000 to 2004.
In an article published in The Atlantic on April 28, 2022, titled, “The Real Reason Cancel Culture is So Contentious,” by Conor Friedersdorf, staff writer at The Atlantic, he opens his article with the following statement:
The majority of Americans who insist that “cancel culture” is a problem and the minority who counter that it is a fraud, a myth, or a moral panic are too often talking past one another.
One faction invokes the term cancel culture as shorthand for a range of complaints: for instance, that figures such as the political analyst David Shor and Emmanuel Cafferty, a California utility-company worker, lost their jobs after innocent acts that provoked unreasonable offense in others; that universities have unjustly punished hundreds of scholars for protected speech in recent years; or that so many Americans are self-censoring that deliberative democracy is threatened…. (Quote source here.)
His article addresses other issues regarding “cancel culture,” but as I thought about the quote above, over time I’ve come to realize that what happened to me back in 2009 is not an uncommon occurrence in the workplace today in America. And to this day, I still have no idea what was the real reason behind why I lost that job, followed by the fact that I was never able to find another job in my professional field (or any field) again. Some people suggested that it had to do with “ageism” since I was a month shy of my 57th birthday when I lost that job. However, I was 56 when I was hired for that Director position, and up until that time I never had any problem finding work in my career field. And during the first year and a half of my job search after losing the job, I came very close to being hired several times, but something unknown to me kept me from being hired.
The answer is more complicated than blaming either “cancel culture” or “ageism,” or whatever reason they placed in my personnel file when I lost that job in 2009, and it has now progressed into all corners of American society today.
So, it would seem that “What’s it all about, Alfie?” is still the question that remains to be answered.