Lemon Sellers and Cashiers

During a lesson, a teacher asks the students: What is disgusting?

After the predictable answers from the students, the teacher explains: Something is disgusting when it is where it should not be. A person’s hair or eyelashes, for example, are beautiful. But finding them in food is disgusting. In the same way, while a good meal on a plate pleases everyone, it is disgusting when it ends up in someone’s hair.

The phrase “If need be, I’ll sell lemons”, used years ago by people who had lost their jobs or were thinking of leaving them, has lately been replaced by “I’ll become a cashier”.

Neither selling lemons nor working as a cashier is a job to be looked down on… Yet for some reason such occupations are seen as the lowest level one could fall to. Being a cashier, a cleaner or a farmer today is certainly nothing to be scorned.

Every job is valuable, all labour is sacred. What matters, however, is the existence of a system in which people can work in line with their knowledge and abilities. Restoring justice, merit and fairness is essential not only for the individuals who have been wronged but for the future of the whole country. Because a society rises not by putting its valuable people in the wrong places but by making the best use of their knowledge and skills.

After being expelled from my profession, like many of my colleagues I had to take up a trade I knew nothing about. Frankly, when you are in a profession accepted by society and valued by people, nobody expects to lose their job and be left with nothing.

With that comfort and the arrogance of my youth, I used to look down on certain occupations. Without realising it, I had for years regarded my own family, who worked as porters and sold second-hand goods, as being on a lower level. Yet the hands of my father, who worked to earn an honest living, had turned to stone and gone numb from calluses. When my own profession was taken from me, I had to start a new life at the very bottom of the porter’s trade I had once looked down on.

Although from the outside it may look like an easy job requiring nothing but physical strength, it was a hard job that demanded experience and skill of its own. Even in those difficult times, the taste of working by putting in one’s own effort was something else entirely. In fact, the basic problem had less to do with the kind of work than with who was doing it.

Will the Expelled Lieutenants Really Work as Cashiers?

People whose skills and training lie in soldiering working as porters or cashiers, fighter pilots selling baked potatoes, high criminal court judges working on construction sites, TÜBİTAK engineers forced to work in the fields: all this is of course absurd.

But it is also ironic that people whose vision does not extend beyond cashiering should choose professions for those who graduated, and with honours at that, from one of Turkey’s toughest schools, the Military Academy. Of course the expelled lieutenants can easily find jobs within a short time in fields with very high social status and income. Yet past experience shows that the opposition parties will not leave them needing to look for such work. The issue here, however, is less who will work in which job than who is competent for which job. Not only in the case of the expelled lieutenants: the posts of many public employees and bureaucrats previously expelled by emergency decree were filled with people who were not competent.

Anyone with a conscience will admit that the Turkey of today lags far behind the Turkey of 15 years ago in every positive sense. The reason is that people who did their jobs properly and had clawed their way to where they were were dismissed simply because they were in opposition.

But this situation is not limited to individual tragedies. The basic functioning of the state must rest on a merit-based system. For a country to progress in every field, from education to justice and from security to science, competent people must be in critical positions. Tearing qualified individuals away from their professions and putting unqualified people in their place brings not only individual victimisation but also social collapse.

At the Root of Our Troubles Lies the Replacement of Merit by Favouritism

If today we complain about the education system, if we talk about shaken trust in the judiciary, if we feel instability in the economy, if we see our scientists leaving the country, the main reason is that competent people have been pushed out of the system and replaced by inadequate ones. When academics, engineers, lawyers and military experts who once ran the country successfully are suddenly dismissed and forced to work in entirely different sectors, it is inevitable that the country falls behind to the same degree.

At this point every part of society bears an important responsibility: to remember once again the value of work and of people. To accept that every job is honourable instead of building a hierarchy among professions and looking down on some of them. But the real issue concerns how a society makes use of its potential. If educated and competent people are forced to work as cashiers, waiters or construction workers while unqualified people are appointed in their place, that society is doomed to lose in the long run.