Americans became wealthy and strong through unique self-reliance, common sense, and delayed gratification. And we — or our children — will soon become poor precisely because we hold on to the romance that producing food and fuel and saving money are icky tasks to be ignored or left to others.
Until we change that attitude, we’ll keep borrowing and spending on ourselves what we have not yet earned — all the way to bankruptcy.
Victor Davis Hanson writes in Americans Want It Both Ways
It's time to reprise one of the very best videos from TED. Mike Rowe, the host of "Dirty Jobs" on the Discovery Channel, travels to Idaho to discover what's really involved in sheep herding and the personal realization of how much he got wrong. One of the most powerful tributes to hard labor I've ever heard. The business of doing the work and getting it done comes first.
He says we as a society have declared a war on work and the collective effect has been the marginalization of too many jobs. He concludes with a paeon to work, manual and skilled labor and their forgotten benefits.
It's a good point, isn't it? It definitely does seem to have something to do with status. Even people who aren't particularly wealthy seem to have a notion of things that just aren't done on account of their status. Sadly, I think some people include raising their own children as one of those tasks.
Kind of depressing that the middle class can't seem to cut out their own niche and are always chasing the leftovers of the rich, no?
Something else: do farmers really get their hands dirty anymore, either? More than the average person, no doubt, but it's not what it once was. A lot of it's done from the cockpit of massive machinery in an almost production line fashion. It's more a game of economics and making ( subsidy + commodity income ) equal or exceed ( machinery + machinery maintenance + fertilizer + pesticide + seed + cost of living ) than back-breaking physical labout (it kind of shows.. if you look at the physical shape of some farmers these days, and the fact that they can operate many hundreds of acres of farmland in their 60s).
Posted by: mattbg at May 7, 2009 7:39 PMI love Mike Rowe - what a terrific guy. I didn't know much of anything about him outside of Dirty Jobs, so now I know he is a very deep thinker as well as being a great communicator! Not to mention he is dead right. My husband and I have often talked about this subject. (yet I am a computer geek and not a plumber or electrician...)
As for farmers not getting their hands dirty - that might be some, but certainly not all by a long shot. All one has to do is read through the archives of the Pioneer Woman's web site to see that.
Posted by: Teresa at May 17, 2009 9:47 PM