The Folks Who Make ItHappen

We have a tendency, as a society, to overlook the “little guy”, the laborer, the stock clerk, the janitor.  It’s easy to think that the pro-athlete, the celebrity, the elected official, or the rich guy somehow has more value than the logger, the hard rock miner, or the truck driver.  We fawn all over any pronouncement that the movie star utters, but won’t ask the garbage man for his opinion.  Bill Gates, of Microsoft fame, says incredibly stupid things, and they are repeated as Gospel across the news and social media.  Just because he is the richest man in America doesn’t make Mr. Gates an expert on the China flu, vaccines, or world population.  We assign celebrities unmerited expertise at our own peril.

We’ve heard so much about those “essential” workers during this China flu fiasco.  We paid lip service to those laborers whose labor was necessary for our people to have food, clothing, and shelter throughout it all.  I say lip service because none of these folks got pay raises, none of them were first in line to get “help” from the government, and nobody offered the stock clerks or the hard rock miners first refusal on the vaccine.  And as the economy tries to shake off the asinine government restrictions, our appreciation for those essential workers seems to be diminishing, as once again, they fade into the background of our community life.

Sometimes, we can get so wrapped up in this “class” identity stuff that we forget who we are and from whence we came. It is easy to come into a rural area like our Redbank Valley, late in the first quarter of the 21st century and take for granted the roads, railroads, schools, churches, the neat and ordered villages, boroughs, and cities and forget that it wasn’t always this way.  Go 3 or 4 miles back off the hard roads and remind yourself of who we are and from whence we came.

Go back in the wilds where the 2nd and 3rd growth hardwood forests are reclaiming the land one more time.  Go back off the hard roads to where the hills tumble down from the sky to the shadowed, bounding brooks; to where Time has no meaning, except in the changing of the seasons.  Get back to where the rocks and the slopes guard the potential riches of the land, to where all that you can hear is the wind in the trees and the high, far away, scream of a hawk.  Go back off the hard roads and remind yourselves what our ancestors found when they first came into this land – a rich land that would only yield its riches to men who were harder than the land itself.

When our people first came into this country, they had to wrest their very existence from the steep, wooded, rocky land. They didn’t negotiate, litigate or debate with the land.  They cut the trees, they hammered the rocks, they pushed off the hillsides to plant gardens and crops.  They delved into the hills to dig the coal, the sand and the clay.  They dammed the rivers so they could float their wares to market.  They leveled the land for roads and railroads. There was nothing here – they built it all from nothing, wresting all that we have today from a hard, unyielding land.

Song writer Arlo Guthrie came close to describing the working folks in the Redbank Valley in his song “City of New Orleans” – “And the sons of pullman porters, And the sons of engineers, Ride their father's magic carpets made of steel”.  We may be more the grandsons and great grandsons of the loggers, the miners, the farmers, and the rivermen, but our people built this land and we should not let them be forgotten.

We should not forget the laborers, the working men and women, the waitresses, the truckdrivers, the loggers, the miners, nor any of the people who keep the lights on, keep the roads repaired, stock the shelves, and do all of the other little things that ensure our modern way of life.  Rush Limbaugh called these folks, “the people who make America work” and theses are the important people in our society.  These are the people, “the sons of pullman porters and the sons of engineers” who carry on the strength and vision of the settler people who conquered the wilderness.  If I found myself on the edge of nowhere and had to survive on the land, I know the folks that I would want to have with me.

Thank a worker today.  They earn our respect ever day.

Stupid Language Nazis

 

As the “winter of our discontent” deepens into China Joe’s “dark winter ahead of us”, there doesn’t seem to be much to laugh about anymore.  Trying to find real humor in lockdowns, masking, social isolation, and virtue shaming is running thin and those jokes have evolved into something between self – preservation and thinly veiled rage.  The antics of the Clown in the White House and the Jesters in Congress would be hilarious, except for the incredible damage that are doing to our country, our economy, our society, and the Constitution. There’s really nothing funny at all going on in Washington.

Yet hope springs eternal in the human spirit, and in all the darkness and discontent, I am continually looking for humor as laughter, honest laughter, truly is the best medicine.  Just the other day I came across a news item that brought real laughter to my lips for the first time in weeks. According to the folks over at PETA – People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals- (not to be confused with “People Eating Tasty Animals”) – have determined that commonly used words and phrases must be “cancelled” from our language because they represent “speciesism, whatever the hell that is.

According to Merriam – Webster, Speciesism is: “1: prejudice or discrimination based on species especially : discrimination against animals 2: the assumption of human superiority on which speciesism is based”

That definition gets a paragraph all to itself simply so you, Constant Readers, have a moment to fully appreciate the vast, incredible, sweeping, panoramic lunacy of it!

According to the piece that I read PETA wants us to show more respect to our animal brethren by not using animal terms to describe negative human traits.  Instead of calling someone a “chicken” we should call them a “coward”, instead of “rat” use “snitch”, “repulsive” instead of “pig”.  Not content to just cancel marvelously descriptive words, the language Nazis want to remove long used phrases as well. It is no longer “acceptable” to say “beating a dead horse”  we should, instead say, “feeding a fed horse”, instead of “bringing home the bacon”, we should “bring home the bacon”, and instead of “taking the bull by the horns”, PETA would have us “take the flower by the thorns”.

With all due respect, “grabbing the flower by the thorns” just doesn’t conjure up the same image of courage in the face of danger that “grabbing the bull by the horns” does – I’m just saying.

The purpose of language is to effectively communicate thoughts and feelings between human beings.  Language – speaking and listening and writing and reading – are “hot” or active forms of communication.  Speaking, listening, writing, and reading require that all parties to the communication be mentally actively involved in the exchange.  How well you convey your thoughts or feelings depends upon your ability to create mental images with words and upon the listener or reader to create similar mental images.  Our cultures and society, and the long repeated use of descriptors and descriptive phrases provide commonly held points of reference.  Eliminating these, only serves to make communication between people less effective and serve to further segment and disrupt our culture and society.

We could write tomes about this, but suffice it to say that this is just simply nitwittery.  But let’s jump to the basic premise of speciesism, that there is a discrimination against animals based on the assumption of human superiority.  Philosophically, we can find the basis for human superiority in the earliest part of the Bible. Genesis, Chapter 1, verse 26 says “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”  It is, therefore, Mankind’s God given Right and authority to raise and hunt animals for food.  It’s right there in the Bible.  Pragmatically, we can look at nature and see that many animal species eat other animal species in order to survive. It is as natural as the snow coming up in the East.  It just is what it is. And, keep in mind that other species of animals consume species of plants to survive.  Where does PETA draw the line?

Keep in mind, now, whilst you are masking up, and isolating yourself that we must be kind to our animal brethren.  Yes, there truly is room for all of God’s creatures – next to the mashed potatoes!