'Cosby Show' actor Geoffrey Owens says he quit N.J. Trader Joe's after 'devastating' job-shaming

The former "Cosby Show" actor job-shamed by some media outlets over the weekend with photos showing him working at a Trader Joe's in New Jersey to make ends meet, said Tuesday he was so upset that he quit his job. Geoffrey Owens

"I was really devastated," Geoffrey Owens, who lives in Montclair, said during an interview on Good Morning America.

But Owens said the outpouring of support he received on social media from the entertainment industry and beyond helped him through it.

"The period of devastation was so short because so shortly after that, the responses my wife and I started to read - literally all over the world ... fortunately, the shame part didn't last very long." "It hurt, but then, it's amazing," he said.

This may be uncomfortable to mention, but the common thing among the earliest colonists who settled what became the United States wasn't their "Englishness". There were also Dutch, Scots Irish, and Germans (the latter in numbers that exceeded English speakers in many places). It was their religion. Whether it was High Church Anglican or Lutheran, English Dissenters, Scots Presbyterians, or Dutch Reformed, they were Protestants. Another aspect of that was a general tolerance for minority believers, including Jews, who were kept on the fringes and worse in Catholic Europe. This came in handy during the Revolution as Jewish finance helped pay for it.

In contrast, Americans who wished to establish themselves in Texas when it was still part of Mexico had to declare themselves to be Roman Catholics. So religion and tolerance were also distinguishing characteristics of "American Beliefs", and an element of our distinctive respect for honest labor, sometimes referred to as the "Protestant Work Ethic". This is not to say that Catholics don't work hard and respect it. Let's just say in comparison with those parts of this hemisphere colonized by the Catholic powers, this part was given a very different start courtesy of that "Ethic".

You’re right, thank you.

Also, it turns out, two suicide attempts, and then some other really, really bad stuff.

“In a better place”...?

Yes. Errr....probably yes.

This is not to say that Catholics don't work hard and respect it.

Let’s face it - slavery is the opposite of respect for people who work hard.
And Christianity in general did not turn against slavery until the colonial era in America was well on the way.
William Wilberforce was the preeminent leader in the antislavery movement worldwide - and he only became an abolitionist in 1787. He eventually succeeded in having a squadron of the Royal Navy assigned to the interdiction of the cross-Atlantic slave trade. Hard as it is to think now, the rest of Protestant Christianity followed the British - and the Catholics were the last to get onboard.
Except for the Christians in the American South, of course - they were uniquely situated to be the last to accept the delegitimization of the institution of slavery. Of course, rich as they were in relative terms in their day, the slaveowners of the South were not all that well off compared to ordinary Americans today. They had no A/C, and thought they had it made if a slave operated a fan for them. The medical care they and their children were afforded would not be worthy of the name today. They had no electricity - meaning that their mansions would not merit a certificate of occupancy today. No electronic communication and entertainment, negligible ability to travel . . .
Slave labor to them was what electricity is to us, pretty much. The comparison I draw is how put out we get when the electric power goes down. Naturally they rationalized their behavior, and objected to abolition.

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