Harold has a meltdown from culture shock, learns about work and school in the future Hawaii and meets a journalist who gives him a beautiful present.
Harold let them get him around the corner before he planted his feet and demanded answers.
"You shouldn't have let me take this. It is obviously worth a fortune and he put years into making it. You should have at least let me give him something for it."
Klee was looking at him like he was a confused child again. "You did give him something, Harold. You gave him your appreciation for his work. More importantly, you gave him the opportunity to do more work that he loves. You validated his time with your appreciation."
"Yes, but how will he buy new materials..." Harold suddenly realized he had painted himself into a corner. There was no money here. "Wait a minute...so he would have just given this knife to anyone?"
Brian jumped in. "Nope, not a chance. He would have given the knife to anyone he wanted to give it to and knowing my uncle, that knife might have sat there for a long time. Okay, so anyone could have come up and said 'I want this' and he couldn't really say no - but I know him - he would have talked with the person, seen if they needed it, felt if they appreciated it, and if they neither needed nor appreciated it - he would have convinced them that he was still working on it or directed their attention to a different knife. No one can force an artisan to give up something they are still working on, but when it's put on the table in the market - it's generally available to anyone. That being said, Uncle Ku has almost never put one of his knives in someone's hands who he didn't already want to have it."
"I'm really confused," Harold said. "All these people - these merchants. There's no money changing hands. Nobody is earning their living doing this..."
Klee interrupted him. "That's a really interesting phrase, Harold. Earning one's living. Why should anyone have to earn their living? You're born and you get to live. It's not for someone else to say that you have to earn your right to exist...but more importantly, I think you are missing something more important. These people are 'worthwhiling their living' - they are doing the things that make them feel fulfilled and happy and then bringing the output to the marketplace. Ku makes these knives because he loves the material, he loves the function, he loves the process of making them, and most importantly - he loves the joy that his work brings to other people. Think about how much pleasure you have already gotten from that little knife. The reason we pushed you away from the stall was so that you wouldn't take away any of the joy and satisfaction you just gave him. You just paid him for all the sweat, the time, the love that he put into that knife. Every time he sees you, he will know that he made your life a little better - by doing what he loves. And trust me - he won't miss it. He is already planning his next obsessive creation."
"She's totally right," Brian said. "He makes lots of knives - and other things - but there is always a special thing that he pours his love into like that one in your hand. I have one - in my kitchen - it's a chef's knife that can cut hairs in half. It too has those thousands of Damascus folds in the blade..."
Harold heard what they were saying but he was feeling exasperated. "So everyone here just works for free and no one has to do anything at all?"
They both looked at him like he was a lunatic.
"Seriously....what's to stop everyone from just sitting around and doing nothing, just sucking up all the labor of others and sponging off of everyone else. Maybe I'll just get a bunch of food and grab a bunch of jewelry and sit on a well made and hand crafted sofa in a free hotel room watching movies for the rest of my life." He knew he was being a drama queen. He wasn't sure if they would even understand what he was talking about. He felt like some fanatical Republican from Fox news talking about lazy welfare recipients...he saw this, he hated it, but he couldn't help it. Yes, this was the world he had always dreamed might be possible, but it was impossible, it wouldn't work. People would take advantage of the system. People would just become parasites...
His rant had drawn a mild amount of attention from those around him.
A young girl laughed and shouted "Yes, I want to watch movies and vids forever!" She skipped away and other people went back to their shopping, talking amongst themselves. Maybe they were talking about him or maybe he wasn't that interesting to anyone but himself.
Harold felt like a fool and shut himself up. He had never realized how much he had internalized those conservative talking points - even though he was a leftist, even though he was surrounded by people in his world who dreamed of a better humanity - he had been indoctrinated.
Klee looked confused. "Is that what you want to do Harold?"
He felt even more idiotic. He tried to imagine what he could say to explain himself. Thankfully, Brian came to his rescue.
"You were in the RSA for waaaaay too long." Brian looked both excited and concerned. He turned to Klee. "The RSA and the old United States before it used this crazy piece of policy that said if you didn't force people to work, to 'earn their living' or 'pay their way' that they would spend their lives just sitting and becoming piles of useless goo. It's sort of understandable because all the mind control systems were largely designed to kill individual initiative and the schools were used to turn children into drone laborers who did their jobs and focused on just one thing or one path - the 'career' path with the idea that it was all they would ever be allowed to do. I've read a lot about 'burnout' and 'couch potatoes'. This was where people would hyper-focus on one thing until they were incapable of seeing anything else - it led to all kinds of obsessive and self-destructive behavior. People weren't allowed to use their own time - they had to give it to companies, bosses, and schools."
Harold had recovered somewhat from his outburst, though he was still embarrassed. "I really don't understand," he said "if no one pays for anything and no one has to do anything then how does anything get done? Why do people work if they don't have to?"
Klee openly laughed at him this time, mockingly.
"Work is the thing that makes life worthwhile," she said to him while giggling through the words. "Why in the world would anyone not want to work? I can't imagine how awful that would feel...to have no purpose, to have no joy of satisfaction and completion, to have no reason for being." She was no longer laughing - the whole idea seemed to have infused her with a deep sadness. "Are you serious Harold? I mean, we're humans. It's what we do. We love to work. We love to make things. We love to build things. We love to help each other and care for each other. We love to discover, explore, design, assist...I can't imagine a world where people weren't encouraged in that. I can't imagine a world where people are discouraged from finding their work. I can't imagine how sad it would be to look around and see people wandering aimlessly with no purpose and no way to find one or a world where people were forced to do things that didn't fulfill them."
"Work is what makes us human," Brian added. "Harold, look around you...it is the work they do that brings joy into all of these people's lives."
"But there must be unpleasant work that no one wants to do..." Harold was calmer and more logical but still couldn't bring himself around to their way of thinking - it was so radically different than the entire concept of the world and time he had come from. "Garbage collectors and sewage workers...laborers..dishwashers." Suddenly, he remembered the conversation they had had earlier. People put their names on waiting lists in order to wash dishes here.
"The harder the job, the more respect and honor there is for those who do it," Brian said. "Believe it or not - some of our cultural heroes come straight from those jobs you mentioned - the essential workers doing the essential work - but you know that, you grew up here - it can't have been so long that you didn't hear the stories of Sven the Sewerman, right? He worked in the sewers and recognized that all the waste could be put to better use...he recruited the chemists and farmers to his cause and even though he couldn't read, he managed to spearhead the effort that led to our most effective biofuel and our most potent land regeneration materials...right? You have to remember Sven."
Once again, Harold's mind was blown. "Work is what makes us human," he repeated. It was the single biggest misunderstanding of the ages. Capitalism and nationalism and serfdom and all the other economic and control systems had stolen the most valuable thing from humans they had - the ability to work for fulfillment. By commodifying work, the systems had turned a joy into a torture. By turning schools into institutionalized worker factories and putting children on direct trajectories to pre- determined careers, they were robbing their youth of the greatest joy in being human. They were robbing their culture of innovation and creation. Suddenly, Harold understood just how joyless his world really was.
"Come on," Klee said. "We can talk about this later. Let's enjoy the market." Harold was happy to leave this conversation for now and Brian reluctantly dropped it.
As they walked, Harold had a new understanding of the people and the goods in the marketplace. This wasn't a place where money was exchanged, this was a place where ideas, work, and time were validated. Klee found a necklace. Harold couldn't tell who was happier, Klee with her new necklace or the jewelry maker who put it on her.
"I can't wait to tell my daughters how happy this necklace made you," the jeweler said. "They helped me polish the stones for it."
"Let's get a snack before we go," Brian said. "I heard that the kids have created a new kind of sandwich."
Harold had noticed that there were a lot of children at the market. Not just running and playing but also many of them were working in booths or carrying things. Brian led them to a food tent that seemed to be staffed completely by kids under ten years old. Not one of them could have been in their teens though there might have been a small twelve-year-old among them.
"Is it a school holiday?" Harold asked. The food tent seemed far too permanent not to be, but he couldn't imagine that the kids were always there.
Klee looked at him with her head cocked to one side. He'd done it again. Thank god for his cover story. She had no idea what he was talking about.
"All the kids here and in the market...don't they go to school?"
"Only if they want to," she said. "I'm sure some of them do or will or have tried it before."
It was a really weird answer.
"But how do they learn to read? Or do math? How do they learn history?" She cocked her head at him again.
"Those are really strange questions, Harold."
"I'm serious."
Brian had gone to order them food. He was at the counter where a young girl, a child, was explaining the menu to him, making recommendations, and writing down what he ordered. She seemed to know what she was doing. Brian treated her just as he would have treated an adult in a similar situation.
"The same way anyone learns anything, Harold. They find someone who knows and ask them to teach them."
"So none of these kids go to school? Aren't there labor laws? Shouldn't there be rules to protect them from being exploited?"
"Sometimes I think you came from another planet, man. Are you saying that you think these kids shouldn't be allowed to work? That they should have to go learn how to read or do math instead?" It sounded different how she said it, different than how he was thinking it. Sort of opposite Still he decided to press on.
"Well, yes. I mean they won't just teach themselves. They need to be grounded in the basics, right?"
"I taught myself to read - with a little help from the librarian. I'm really confused Harold. I can't think of anything worse than not letting a child work, but you're saying it as if it's bad to let children work...I mean look at these kids - they are doing something really special. This kids co-op is completely run and operated by children - they get all their food from child farmers and gatherers, they make their own recipes, kids built this tent and probably the tent itself was made by kids. Wait until you try the food...I mean sometimes it's a miss, but generally - they do everything every bit as good as adults and the joy of the work, the experience, it leads them to where they need to go. If they need to learn math, it becomes apparent and they know where to find a teacher."
"Why did you learn to read?" Harold was having his worldview flipped on his head. As he thought about it, he realized that without money there was not really an incentive for child labor to be exploited. He thought about his own childhood and his education - the important things, he had generally taught those to himself as well - with the help of the one or two good teachers he had been blessed with in nearly twenty years of inefficient and forced education.
"I didn't know any brain surgeons," she told him.
Brian arrived with the food and drink. The drinks were in beautiful pink glasses that appeared to have been hand blown. The food was on stout wooden plates. Brian carried it all on a tray...
"One of the perks of having worked here when I was a kid is that they still let me carry my own tray," he said. "Check this out - they've apparently started making bread from ulu-flour - so it's breadfruit bread and the stuffing is made from soybean paste and coconut..."
The little sandwiches were snack sized and served hot. The smell made Harold's stomach take control of his brain. Thankfully. The kids had done something incredibly wonderful...and delicious.
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