Rounding the Corner
photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash
Thinking about the end of year with Thanksgiving approaching, I thought I’d go back to last year’s blog, curious to see what I was scratching at a year ago. Only a closing mention of Thanksgiving last year, so I must have been thoroughly engrossed in something important… or over my head, one.
What’s transpired since? Well, we finally had ourselves a presidential election–oh, and a visitation from a predicted pandemic–predicted by the epidemiologists, given how populous and mobile the world’s population has become. (Did you notice how there’s ‘dem’ in both those nouns?) About that SOB Covid-19 that’s still hanging around, taking out folks at will, we now have three possible vaccines for it, which if true, will be the fastest vaccine development in history. Maybe we shouldn’t be trashing science?
And I never thought I’d be cheering for Pfizer.
For introverts like myself, the isolation by virus hasn’t been so terribly bad. I already had a year’s practice prepped to sit in the downstairs family room with Layla as a companion waiting for an idea, er, lightning to strike. Layla was the wiser, taking her morning naps. Glad we don’t live in a Manhattan condo.
Medieval monks in Bourgogne didn’t have it so bad meditating on what kinds of cheese goes best with Pinot. And those Buddhists in Tibet–maybe they didn’t eat as well as French monks, but think of the view, enough to turn you spiritual.
The name of last year’s blog was Cause or Consequence ? The blog was ranting about a book review in the NY Times, The Meritocracy Trap, whose author and reviewer were of like minds. Both believed higher education–and the Ivy League specifically–is causing society’s collapse into a feudal state of lords and ladies with serfs to serve them–though that’s condensing their argument. I took exception to their claims–being somewhat closer to the former than the latter, as well as having matriculated at Yale when it needed to fill its Southern Boy quota.
Think of what the Yale acceptance committee thought when I arrived in an old U.S. Army jacket and hair to my shoulders, driving an elderly VW Bug. What on earth were they growing down there? Power to the peoples?
Might it be possible America’s middle class has shrunk along with its blue collar jobs rather than the upper class ballooning in wealth? Meaning the country no longer has jobs in the same number for blue collar people? And it’s hardly a secret that outsourcing to China, Thailand et al. took a chunk of low end jobs overseas. No reason to discuss the impact Walmart and Amazon have had on retail work.
When Tolkien described Mordor as this bleak, smoldering wasteland, he had a clear mental image of the industrialization of his Great Britain. Prior to Tolkien, Dickens described the desperate conditions of the working class of his day. We in the West have offloaded the worst low paying jobs on developing countries, but seems we forgot to replace them with better work of any kind except for jobs paying minimum wage. I got the impression from The Meritocracy Trap that author and reviewer are convinced the Ivy League has been in total control during the slow slide after World War II.
Holy shit, bro–you’ve been doing that a while; it just got to the rest of ya’ll?
Me, I think the country’s been sitting on our collective asses since at least the days of Reagan’s ‘Why Worry–Be Happy,’ better known as the Alfred E. Newman approach to politics.
Summer Laboring
During college, one summer I worked for an electrical construction company, spending most of my time as a grunt in the field, seeing as I had zip if not zero experience. The company was building a power line following a new highway near Columbia, S.C. through a hot, mosquito-infested swamp, a few miles north of Wateree Swamp. Water Moccasins yeah. Heat stroke was the real risk. Only worse work was what the road crews did laying and smoothing the smoking asphalt down–only Blacks would take that hellish work, and a handful of Whites.
It was black and white to me that far back. Living in South Carolina, the division was scientifically clear in the 60s. A close friend of mine, a former girlfriend, says times are changing in South Carolina. The fact that a hippy girl–who never lost her smile–can see it in her daughter’s friends is proof.
That summer, ground crew and linemen, Blacks and Whites alike, spoke an unfamiliar language from what I’d heard growing up, with expressions and slang that left me baffled. And I caught all sorts of grief for talking like a college kid, most of it good humored. Though, before the summer’s end I came to adopt their thick-sounding dialect–out of comradeship as much as anything.
During a day-long thunderstorm when the crews didn’t go out, I was reassigned to work the warehouse under the direction of an older man in charge. Memory of a thoughtful, philosophical even, man who could tell me where in that cavernous warehouse every single piece of equipment was stored, from cross-arms to transformers to 18” galvanized pole bolts still stays with me. This was decades before spreadsheets and RFID tracking systems; he didn’t need to consult the 3-ring binder since he carried it in his head. He used the binder mainly to keep track of the quantities. I believe he was one of the few Blacks working in the company. That they employed a Black in such a key position was intriguing–though the management knew his worth.
Day to day, the men I sweated alongside were hardly ignorant, just not well educated. They might as well have been next door neighbors. Tough, blue collar workers doing a hard job.
Bucket trucks were rare; most of the work was done by muscle. Linemen would climb a forty foot creosoted pole, yelling back down whether the line was live or dead by backhanding it. Reaching for it like a greenhorn caused your hand reflexively to clutch a live wire tight–and be fried by a thousand volts. Backhanding a live line might hurt like hell, but you walked away. Though the owner’s son got knocked off a pole by a live line that was dead coming in from one side and live the other. The violence of the charge blew him off the pole. The forty-foot fall cracked his back, though he lived to tell about it.
I’ve heard some people regard hourly workers as dispensable, that if you’re not white collar, you’re unimportant. Of course, few of these ‘critics’ would ever consider climbing a live wire pole going to work every day.
“Boy, ain’t got all day. Throw me up a bolt.”
We’d hoist eighty pound transformers to the top of these poles by rope and pulley, or heavy ceramic isolators, etc. doing it in 100 degree heat and humidity. And those boys sitting up there were kings of all they surveyed.
The smaller holes we’d dig by hand with a hole digger and ply bar. We had an ancient auger, mounted on the back of a World War II vintage army truck for the deep holes. I drove that sucker back to the shop a couple times, finding the gears as I went.
Come Friday and the weekend, the crew would climb in the back of the pickups with a six pack for the hour or so ride home. Come Monday I heard one lineman say he was still working off his weekend. Didn’t seem a brag so much as truth.
It was eye-opening to realize that attending Clemson, I was already among the elite in my hometown. It makes me smile to think what those boys would say if they knew I had ‘gradutated’ from Yale a few years later.
I needed those low-paying summer jobs as much as any of them.
Power Trip
Family photo of my father in his twenties left of the transit before the methane explosion.
A recent PBS program, Power Trip with Jonathan Scott, caught my attention. It was on the nation’s glacially slow shift from fossil fuels (here’s hoping) to solar energy, a less damaging energy source. In my Ivy League studies, I studied solar energy. Much in Yale’s favor, I landed a teaching assistant job editing an adjunct professor’s survey book on clean energy. Everett Barber was a mechanical engineer with an early solar energy company. I have no idea to this day what Barber thought of my work.
I mention this to say that was fifty years ago. And the industry is only now taking off against stiff opposition–from the utility and fossil fuel industries. Fifty years ago, a minority were warning we’d run out of oil. Meantime we sucked so much oil and learned to love Middle Eastern despots and sent how many grunts to fight?
Foresighted industrialist came up with fracking, to wring out the very last bit of fossil fuel. Let no fossil go to waste, eh?
Long term, fracking is destined to contaminate groundwater in places like Pennsylvania by pumping the polluted water back into the ground for disposal–like slow acting nuclear waste. And when Biden ‘misspoke’ about winding down fracking on federal land, the pushback from those parts of the country where the fracking jobs are available was intense. I seriously doubt the masters of industry will chose to live within eyesight, let alone drink the water. They can leave that for the poor folk.
Blue collar workers have a legitimate grudge: it is the evident indifference of those in power–Reps and Dems alike. That so many have gotten behind Trump’s banner only shows they don’t know who to blame–normal folk. Even White men are raised by their parents not to grab women by their pussies, and by twelve or thirteen they stop lying about tall tales like that.
Power Trip included a poignant interview with a retired West Virginia coal miner dying of black lung. His father had died from black lung, and he soon followed the filming.
My own father died of emphysema, his lungs ruined in a methane gas explosion in a Pennsylvania mine. In his twenties and working his way through college studying architecture, a degree he never completed, the damage kept him out of World War II. He was dead before I turned five.
At one time there were over 860,000 miners. The number has dwindled to 50,000. The sad irony of the declining numbers of miners is their replacement by machines taking the tops of entire mountains in gargantuan bites, shaking out the coal and dumping the spoils for some next generation to deal with. Called MTR (Mountain Top Removal), the scale of the process is mind-boggling.
The results are equally so: Coal Power Impacts on the Concerned Scientists’ website digs into it (pun intended). Safer than mining, but the moonscapes left behind don’t help the wildlife. And for every ton of coal extracted and burned, we pay a price in CO2 emissions.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, total U.S. energy-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions were about 5,142 million metric tons in 2019. Coal represents 20% of that measurement. What are U.S. energy-related carbon dioxide emissions by source and sector?
The country needs a retooling of its infrastructure. If we wait for the Warren Buffets of the world to chip in, we’ll still be waiting decades from now. Buffet likes utilities to balance his portfolio; whether they will help the cause remains to be seen.
The U.S. government subsidized the transcontinental railroads, ship-building, the space industry, computers and the Internet. Currently, it’s funding one of the two U.S. vaccines being developed to fight Covid-19.
Time for the country to pony up again. We have work to do, and willing workers to do it. The next time you enjoy cruising the Skyline Drive in the fall, think of the CCC workers who built it.
We need true high speed rail connections from Florida to Maine, from Southern California to Seattle, and across the U.S. We need to replace the electric grid and petroleum pipelines with renewable energy sources. We need to refit older, more polluting industries. We need to get to zero carbon emissions. Government spending on these projects is investment, not waste.
First and foremost, we need to educate our children, every last one.
“The disparity of wealth today will swiftly be evaporated if we don’t figure this out–that we all need to be about important work–work that tells us we are valuable–work that helps our children. We all can’t be computer geeks; someone needs to be building the next generation power lines. The country might begin by rebuilding its failing transportation systems, replacing coal-fired power plants with renewable energy sources, finding the means to get into space full time where those brawny men and women can throw their shoulders to the wheel again.
“It should scare us that we in the present day are squandering the wealth accumulated by the sweat of our forefathers with no visible means of renewing it for all our children. All Our Children.”
from Cause or Consequence?
Something to consider this Thanksgiving–and perhaps look back and be grateful for in years to come.