If we disrespect skilled trades, we’re ignorant and arrogant fools

By David McElroy · June 20, 2018

As I walked into Lowe’s tonight, I realized I was too ignorant to even ask for the part by its name. Was it a socket? A plug-in doohickey? Or “the stuff under where the plug goes”?

I don’t remember what I called it now, but a couple of employees looked puzzled until one of them realized what I wanted and directed me to Aisle 12. After wandering that aisle and confirming how hopelessly ignorant I was with these parts, a nice fellow shopper asked what I was looking for. She directed me to the right place — on Aisle 13, it turned out — and advised me about which one to buy.

I was completely out of my element and it made me feel shame and regret — not for the first time — about the utter disdain which I used to have toward people who did the sort of blue-collar work which I looked down upon.

I don’t know exactly where this ugly early attitude came from. I’m from a family where everyone was expected to go to excel academically and then go to college. I strongly considered becoming an electrical engineer, a lawyer, a psychologist, a minister and a few other things before settling into a life as as journalist and then political consultant.

I somehow came to see people who did skilled blue-collar jobs as somehow inferior to people like me. I’ve come to understand over the years how short-sighted and ignorant I was.

I have this on my mind tonight because of an electrical problem in my bedroom tonight. The electrical socket you see above suddenly started sparking and hissing before a circuit breaker shut down power to a good portion of my house.

In the dark and sweltering heat, I had to pull the socket assembly out of the wall and figure out what to do — with just the light from my iPhone. (I had turned off every breaker in the house. I wasn’t taking a chance on being wrong about what controlled the power to those wires.) I could tell that the piece was fried — although I didn’t know how badly until I saw it in the light after the repair was made. That’s when I left for Lowe’s to buy the replacement.

I was so ignorant about what I was doing that I had to make a second trip out to get a wire-cutters and a wire-stripper. I couldn’t even find a screwdriver when I started tonight, so I bought a couple of those, too.

I carefully made a diagram of the wiring layout and numbered which wires went into which holes. Then I taped a piece of paper to each wire as I cut it, labeling each with the number that corresponded with a point on my diagram.

An hour or so after it started, I screwed the cover back onto the socket and turned on all the circuit breakers. Everything worked and the lamp plugged into that socket came on without a complaint.

Part of me felt proud of figuring it out, but then I realized that all I’d done was what a typical 10-year-old could have done in a household where such skills are common.

I had an odd feeling as I was wandering around in Lowe’s looking for my part. I found myself thinking, “I want to build a house.” It was a strange thought for someone with no such skills and no inclination to do hard work on that nature.

I think I felt that way because humans have always been builders. We’ve survived this long by making things and fixing things. Our ancestors had to invent the thousands of technologies which built on one another to give us our comfortable modern world.

There’s something in me which still appreciates that — and I loved the tiny little feeling that maybe I could be part of that long historical parade of people who had to learn how to build and repair.

A skilled electrician would have had the tools which I had to go buy. He would have known exactly where to get the part — if he didn’t already have a dozen in his truck. He could have stripped the wires and put them into the new socket in five minutes. Probably less than that.

All of the other skilled trades are the same. Every one of them knows how to do things which I know nothing about. Every one of them is a craftsman to one degree or another. Every one of them can trivially do things that seem like major accomplishments to me.

I appreciate the things I can do. I have skills which relatively few people have. I’m good at thinking and creating. I know that and I haven’t lost sight of those things.

But I feel as though I owe an apology to a lot of people who I once looked down upon because they weren’t as educated and sophisticated as I was. They weren’t as good with words. They didn’t always know how to dress for success. They didn’t always speak with good grammar.

I was wrong to look down on these skilled people. They never knew I felt that way. They don’t really care that I felt that way.

But still, I apologize to all the electricians and carpenters and plumbers and heavy-equipment operators who had intelligence and skills that were applied in very different ways than I’ve applied myself. I apologize to all the people who do such things — across a broad range of fields. Most of you deserve my respect, not my disdain, because you know how to skillfully do things which I’ll never be able to do.

If the modern economy eventually falls apart for awhile — as I expect it to — they’re the ones whose skills will be in demand, not mine. Maybe I need to learn more about construction or welding or plumbing. Maybe they’ll be the ones teaching me.

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It’s something I wrote four and a half years ago — in the desperation of loneliness — and it’s become my most popular article. It’s not my best writing. It’s raw and unpolished. But it seems as though a lot of people can identify with it. It’s called Missing someone creates intense physical sensations in my heart. Just to give you an idea how many people still read it, I had 11,586 people visit the page last month — from 2,907 cities and towns around the world. London sent the most readers for it, followed by New York, Westminster, Los Angeles, Chicago, Kuala Lumpur, Melbourne, Sydney, Toronto and almost 3,000 more. I’ve noticed something interesting. It always gets the most hits from an area of the world in the late hours, right after midnight, and that breaks my heart — because I understand why. All these people are so lonely and are missing someone so much that they turn to a search engine looking for answers, so they stumble upon this piece. I wrote this late at night on the day after Christmas because my heart was breaking. I needed to express how much I missed someone, and a lot of people seem to identify with it. If you’re one of those people, I have no way of knowing who you are, but I empathize with you. I know why you hurt. I wish I could do more to help. I hurt with you, because after all this time, I still feel the same way.

I just found out that a long-time Facebook friend died a few days ago. I never met Tom Ender, but reading his posts and interacting with him over the years made me feel as though I knew him. He was a kind and gentle man who was also a fierce and principled individualist. When his long-time wife, Julie, died several years ago, it broke his heart. About a year ago, he posted an old photo from their wedding long ago and wrote, “18 months ago, Julie passed from this world. I believe we will meet again, though I don’t know details of how.” As I mourn the death of this gentle and brilliant man, my fondest hope is that he and Julie are together again by now. Goodbye, Tom.

When Francesca Montanaro’s school shut down in March due to fears about the new new coronavirus, she had nowhere to go. Francesca’s mother is a nurse working long hours in New York City. The grandparents who would otherwise have provided child-care were old enough to be vulnerable to the bug, so they were out. That meant Francesca has spent the last few months with her dad at his pizza shop in the Bronx. In this six-minute piece from Radio Diaries and NPR, we take a look at what it’s been like to be a bright and typical 11-year-old thrust into a completely different world. She puts pizza boxes together and answers phones. She’s even learned to make perfect pizzas. I found the story touching. It reminds me of the degree to which children used to learn more about the real world than they do today. Even though she won’t follow in the pizza-making footsteps of her father, I’ll bet this will be one of the defining experiences of her childhood, one that she will treasure for years to come.

I noticed three instances over the weekend of people talking about Donald Trump’s “campaign of hate.” I wanted to correct them — because they misunderstand this narcissist — but I knew they wouldn’t get my point. It’s not that I’m defending him, because what he does is worse than hate. You simply have to understand the way narcissists think to understand him. Trump doesn’t hate. It’s worse than hate. He’s indifferent and angry with anyone who doesn’t obey him and worship him, those who don’t give him what’s called “narcissistic supply.” People believe that Trump hates blacks or Hispanics or foreigners or whatever group which he’s seen as hating. It’s true that he experiences rage at people who will not give him what he wants, but he’s not in touch enough with his real self to feel real hatred, much less to feel real love. He’s like a vampire who sucks all the available praise and adoration from any group of people — any way he can get it. He doesn’t love rural, blue-collar white folks, but their adoration gives him what he craves. He’s not emotionally mature enough even to hate. For a narcissist, people are simply objects to manipulate, depending on what he can get from them. Trump’s indifference is far worse than hatred. This isn’t ideological or political. It’s pathological. He’s not mature enough to hate.

The decline of modern culture can be seen clearly by looking at what passes for public discourse. There was a time when people who wanted their ideas accepted made rational arguments. It was assumed that most people were bright enough and rational enough to evaluate those arguments — and a surprising number of them really were. Today, the arguments are made in the form of irrational and simplistic graphics called “memes.” Because these graphics can’t convey complex or nuanced information, they present dumbed-down presentations of positions which are stunningly juvenile and seem designed to offend rather than to convince. We have regressed from books and dense pamphlets to a level more like that of angry kindergartners making crayon-scrawled hate notes to send to other children. Reason no longer plays a role in public discourse, and this signals the coming fall of this society.

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