Bourgeois laziness

Every Saturday, around 10 or 11 am, a Latino couple tends the yard of the house outside my window. They mow the lawn, trim the bushes, water the flowers, and rake away stray leaves. They make a lot of noise, and their degree of annoyingness depends on how hung over I am and how late I’ve slept in.

But that’s besides the point I want to make. The Latino couple — with kid in tow, entertaining himself as best he can while his parents diligently attend to a yard they don’t own — represent something I despise about SoCal: bourgeois and upper crust laziness.

By definition, rich people distain sweaty labor. It’s above them; they don’t believe in doing something they can comfortably pay others to do. That type of logic has persisted through the centuries and transcends ethnicity. Everyone else, everywhere else, did the work themselves, breaking their own backs and salting their own shirts with their own sweat. However, that’s not the case in Southern California.

Now, the people who live next door — I’m not really sure if it’s one residence with different buildings or a house and a couple unrelated apartments on the same property (they pack ‘em in here) — could be pretty well off. But chances are they’re not. Wealthy people on the coast like to live in expensive, and ugly, faux-Roman style townhouses with pillars and statues and fountains; they prominently display pianos and tacky Victorian furniture in the front rooms. The house outside my window has a fountain, which runs periodically, but it’s an older home. Assumingly, they’re middle class Joes. However, they, like most middle class Californians, don’t do they’re own yard work. They hire immigrants to do it.

Of course, normal people hiring out housework is not just a California thing. I made a ton of money off lazy neighbors who’d rather pay me to shovel snow or mow grass than do it themselves. But the level of it out here is unique to SoCal. Latino laborers are hired to do almost all the yard work, all the tedious chores homeowners elsewhere in the country do after work or on the weekend. There seems to be a consensus here that there are people who do the yard work and people who pay the people who do the yard work.

As it is with almost every other aspect of life and social culture in Southern California, the ability to hire others to do your work is about image: it makes you look important and wealthy. It’s not about having the money to do it, but about looking like you have the money. The reason many middle class people do it is the same reason why they loan and lease — not buy; nobody buys anything in California — luxury cars they can’t afford: they’re trying to keep up with the Jones’.

To me it’s laziness. I have no respect for people who pay others to do work they could do themselves. I especially have no respect for the hypocrites who complain about immigrants from Mexico — some going so far as to support sweeping deportations — but sit back and have Latinos keep their house clean and shrubbery groomed.

Get off your ass and do it yourself.