In Breitbart, famed “Southern Lady” author Charlotte Hays shares some background on her new book: When Did White Trash Become the New Normal?

When President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed in his Second Bill of Rights that having a job is a right, the squire of Hyde Park unwittingly ushered in the era of White Trash Normal, the subject of my new book.

With apologies to FDR, a job is not a right.

…Some recent college graduates show up for job interviews in get-ups that would make Snuffy Smith, the moonshiner from the Appalachia, look respectable. Let’s face it: Tattoos are dandy if you are a Maori but otherwise do little to improve a young person’s job prospects. Sixty percent of respondents in York College of Pennsylvania’s 2013 report on Professionalism in the Workplace, which deals with employers’ experiences with recent college graduates, regard tattoos as an impediment to professionalism. Yet 38 percent of those in the 18-29 age group are inked.

Even more basic, perhaps, many college grads seem not to have come to terms with the concept of–uh–work.

….One of the main reasons so many privileged young college graduates act like White Trash is, ironically, that they are spoiled. They don’t recognize that work is something you do out of obligation. Enthusiasm is nice, but it’s not historically why people have worked.

Carrying FDR’s gospel of job-entitlement just a bit further, President Obama said during his 2013 State of the Union address that nobody should work full time and still live in poverty. This sounds nice, but I wonder what America’s founders would have thought if somebody had told them this. They knew you had to work full time to survive on a newly settled continent and still maybe do some starving along the way. The upshot is that through thrift and good habits, they prospered.

If we don’t cure our trashy ways, we as a society are going down. If the recession has a silver lining, maybe it is teaching some recent college graduates the value of a job.