“Every day, I read about how hard it is for a lot of people to find a good job.”

Network TV rarely catches my eye, but there I was on a Sunday night enjoying a 60 Minutes fluff piece when the hoary, propped-over-his-desk Andy Rooney appeared to wrap up the show. I leaned in to hear this commentary, ready to soak up the wisdom and empathy of someone who’s seen the booms and the busts go by.

“I’m skeptical of course,” Rooney continued, “because I think if you know how to do anything, someone’s going to pay you to do it.”

You probably know how to do a thing or two. I suspect you know how to do a lot of the work that makes public interest law happen. But maybe you are also a recent grad or former clerk, and, in spite of all your resume building, you face unemployment or some variation on underemployment. Maybe you’re as able and willing as ever to research and apply case law from the European Court of Human Rights, or maybe conducting a KYR presentation in Spanish at a county prison is what you are pining to do for a living. I bet you believe, firmly and deep down, that, given some training and patience, you could jump into an intake, develop a case theory, draft a complaint, and bust down to the clerk’s office in a blaze of social justice passion. That’s all good, but if you can’t seem to get paid for doing that stuff, Andy Rooney suggests you stop thinking so highly of yourself.

Rooney’s idea that someone out there will pay you “assumes that a person who has been an executive, for example, would clean up debris by the side of the road for the county supervisor if he really needed a job.” According to Rooney, “he won’t do that of course because what he thinks he ought to be is the county supervisor.” In other words, if you are suffering in this job market, then you just need to come down to earth. Your J.D. is no excuse to be waiting out the recession, volunteering your skills and hoping for the right kind of opportunity. You want a paid job? Stop being elitist and whiny and pick up a plumber’s wrench already.

We need people who can actually do things. We have too many bosses and too few workers. More college graduates ought to become plumbers or electricians, then, go home at night and read Shakespeare.

Is that what’s keeping the unemployment figures so high — intellectual indulgence? In my own case, last summer, after five consecutive months of searching for any quasi-legal job with a minimum wage applying to any paying job out there reading Shakespeare, I took the best job I could get: kitchen prep/barrista/ice cream scooper at a vegetarian cafe. Learning my job from a doe-eyed musician just 10 years my junior, I eventually figured out how to fold a chili cheese wrap and to scoop the perfect, spherical scoop of ice cream. The 16-year old high schooler, the stoner JC student, the struggling public interest lawyer — we co-workers at the cafe could each succeed and fail in the same ways, on the same tasks. We experienced similar moments of satisfaction and frustration, and we each had some bigger plans for ourselves, whether it was going on tour, getting messed up, or practicing law.

But what I also discovered in that rank-and-file work experience was that I never felt proud of myself for the work I was doing. Was it elitism and self-glorification that got in the way?

Contrary to Andy Rooney’s impression, I held no illusion that I should have been the “executive” in the kitchen or at the counter. I accepted my limitations and nonetheless knew, deep down, that I had every ability in me to contribute to something bigger, the activism, the campaigns, the cases that might impact change and lives. Perhaps this was the illusion — to aspire toward high-minded achievements and get paid for it — but it was the illusion I had clung to over the past four years as a law student and recent grad.

Though hardly Shakespeare, the loftiness of public interest career goals often garner ridicule precisely because they seem about as ridiculous to the dollars-and-cents crowd as 16th century poetry does. The 60 Minutes commentary gives me pause, for the first time in years, to wonder whether the ridicule is fair. How pie-in-the-sky is it, in this economy, to be discussing pride and aspirations as legitimately self-imposed restraints on one’s job choices? Just like everyone else out there, a public interest lawyer needs to earn cash, pay off debts, and support dependents. Where exactly does serving your community or upending systemic injustice fit into the struggle just to get by?

Thrown at us from the minute we utter the word “public” to the unconverted, these are familiar questions for P.I. law students and lawyers. Self-examination, however, could go further. The 60 Minutes piece leads me to question the extent to which the careeristic orientation of public interest law predominates over one’s public-minded motivations. If ‘public interest’ describes the work you were doing before opting to pursue a J.D., is it satisfying enough for you to ‘go back’ and do ‘non-legal’ public interest work? Is it ‘natural’ to feel jilted when your law degree carries you no higher up the public interest ladder than your undergrad degree? Or are you just too caught up in the professionalization of social change?

Obviously, Andy Rooney doesn’t have these concerns in mind. His concern is that we bail on our high art and paid searches for meaning. It is nice to think you could jump out of the sinking hippie ship of public interest law, into something plebian and ‘useful,’ something that will pay you for the sake of function alone. Switch to corporate law? If you’re like me, you have no clue at this point how to operate the corporate sector. Get a job as an electrician or plumber? Those mid- to high-skill vocations would require extensive training, certification and practice before anyone would think to hire you. How about a steady low-skill job? Construction? Package delivery? You will be laughed out of your interview — as I was last summer when I showed up at UPS the smallest, least physically endowed person in the entire building. Of course, that kind of humiliation isn’t the worst. At least I had good reason to expect it and little trouble understanding it. I can’t say the same of my experiences in the P.I. job market.

About this contributor:  Zafar is a lawyer/activist and itinerant blogger based in Baltimore, Maryland. He graduated from American University Washington College of Law in 2008 and is former Co-Chair of The United People of Color Caucus of the National Lawyers Guild. Catch his twitter feed @Z4F4R. Read more from this contributor