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.
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