There Is No Such Thing As A Noble Profession

The title of this maniacal diatribe is purposely misleading and meant to provoke. You can judge a post by its title and most of us do. I just want to challenge why we seek a certain purpose in life. I am a capitalist, undoubtedly. So I do not fault anyone for pursuing a career because it will feed their family better. Who is to say that you can't make a lot of money with a noble career? But, let me ask a dumb ass question, it is only dumb because I know the answer. Do we seek our purpose based upon nobility or money? (I would have said happiness but we all know that's some corny ass Disney bull shit) Let me give you the answer that I told you I know; of course it's money!

Naturally, we have to assess our conscience. There are so many unpaid interns running around start ups, schools, and many other occupations in anticipation of a glorious payday that will pay for their student loans, Air Jordans, ripped designer jeans, and video games. Many unpaid interns anticipate the payday of their dreams to help pay for their 3,000 dollar a month 150 square feet apartment. A payday, whether it be the day you hit the lottery or every other Friday, is how we charter the path of our lives. Money is our comfort. So, there cannot be any noble professions. That is why it is difficult to judge the motives of anyone fighting everyday to survive and get home to their family, to live comfortably.

What is bothersome to me, is that this capitalist survivalist mindset was supposed to elude certain people in our society. It is propagated that there are those few and proud that give themselves to certain professions to benefit the "greater good" selflessly and salary could never be as important as the work being done. Professions that represent the order that allows a society to function and thwart the threat of chaos. Actually, these professions should ensure that chaos isn't plausible because of the security and comfort that these professions help manifest in the community.

What enticed me to write about nobility is a poster I saw on the train. My eyes were focused on "Revolt of the Cockroach People" by Oscar Zeta Acosta. Then they were focused on my phone, bullshitting on social media apps. I raise my head and just above the glistening bald head of a man in a blue shirt with a red tie is a LAPD recruitment poster with an officer's salary as the selling point.

"From $59,717 to $91,956 a year"

The font isn't particularly huge but to me it seems like a mural on the inside of the train in neon pink writing covering the bald headed mans shirt, the woman with the guitar, the dread headed kid with the skateboard; blanketing the windows that show the beautifully diverse, upscale and grimy Los Angeles landscape passing by at 40 miles per hour.

We live in a new world of very specific targeted advertising. The LAPD, in my shitty opinion, should not be recruiting people to become apart of the brand that is the Los Angeles Police Department by baiting income. They need to target those good people who want to police the individual neighborhoods in which they live. They need to recruit those who understand the civic responsibility behind being a police officer, those who see that the intelligently agreed upon perils of a neighborhood need elimination. Those who refuse to cruelly judge the people in a certain neighborhood because they grew up in that neighborhood too! Those that see that strategic capitalist investment and protection has to exist with comfort in these neighborhoods. Posters and other advertisement need to recruit those noble few who want to help police neighborhoods and not market that getting paid is the reason you should put on the uniform. This fosters this mentality that a lot of us have when we're on the job, I'm just paid to be here. They should want to be there, helping protect the life of the people who pay their salary. Those who will not be prejudice or racist against those they police. Those who want to make a noble contribution to the neighborhood, to society, and a grand payday isn't the most important factor to them because they are pursuing their altruistic goals.

In a world where the modes of production are constantly changing, where technology is eliminating well paying jobs. In a time where desire and vanity have become our greatest utilities. This poster recruits in a space where most who ride the train aren't making at least $55,000 a year. In a society that constantly puts your moral and noble spirit against your need to survive this poster tries to exploit both. It isn't about protecting neighborhoods and the people who curate them. It's about making a paycheck and making it home or to the mall or to that restaurant to spend the money that you made.


An officer can get paid less than $30.00 an hour, to fire a bullet that takes milliseconds to leave a gun, and take a life that took years to mold. They have the authority to put someone in jail and ruin a family, and generations of families. The glorified tax collector; taxing citizens based upon arbitrary ordinances and laws that are arbitrated not for the benefit of the populous but for the benefit of the politicians and the constituency that they serve. I would say they serve the city but they don't. They serve those who give them money to not really care about civic or societal or human responsibility. Politics has never been noble and that is why politicians never ask for the head of those who kill the people who voted them into office.

I don't know if us older Millennials were the last generation where American Idealism was heavily promoted but as a fourth grader, I remember wanting to be a lawyer. I recall my other friends wanting to be lawyers, firemen, politicians, teachers, and policemen because of the nobility attached to those jobs and a promoted civic responsibility, an empiricist's responsibility, for your life and the lives of others who live in your community. Luckily, all of my closest friends were intelligent enough to avoid those bull shit professions (thank you friends for understanding that nobility in money making is complete bullshit). You have to ease your conscience into complete denial of your life being worth more than your paycheck and capitalism at this point in it's incredulous development will not allow for that.

Police Officers are given a protection greater than any document (including the Constitution) allows because of this inherent nobility attached to the job that they perform. We believe that police officers are more noble (and should be more noble) than we are. When currently, they are simply people who are trying to make it home to feed their families. They are people with biases that should disqualify them from policing anything but a goddamn subway sandwich.

What evades these motherfuckers shooting down unarmed black people in cold blood, in the middle of society's passive eyes, is that they are admitting to the destruction of this nobility. $91,000 a year is worth a black family being sentenced to ruin, the death of legacy. The destruction of the family has been suborned; the destruction of the black family has been facilitated by our future president (I'm assuming Hillary Clinton is going to win). The nobility that exists in politics has proven to agree to marginalize. The trigger happy, racist, asshole cops forget that that black person lying cold, unburdened, free from the scourge of prejudice, was simply trying to get home to their family too. A family that now has been set back a lifetime. Police officers were once sworn to protect but they have become grave, corrupted, detriments to black people, to civility, and to our society's growth. They are so obsessed with making it home to their families that they will kill a non-threat based upon an unwarranted fear created by gross, inaccurate stereotypes, which feed the prison industry, "justice" system, and the politicians who exploit them all. Police officers no longer (if ever) possess the knowledge or nobility to maintain a neighborhood's safety.

The police have become occupiers and oppressors. "The badge" has become a shield for racist, oppressive, prejudice, selfish capitalist who do not care to see black people breathe. They are merely exercising there impunity to kill black people. We cannot continue to perceive that the police hold a righteousness that has never existed in the profession. It is a job in which you can make a great middle class income. Come one, come all. Send your resumes to the LAPD.

There is no such thing as nobility. I apologize to nurses, teachers, fire fighters, doctors, bankers, rappers, painters, writers, filmmakers, photographers, DJs, who only enter their profession to help society cope and grow, grow and cope.