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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I received the first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine Monday — and I’m happy to report that I’m neither dead nor a zombie controlled by Bill Gates and Co. Eligibility was recently opened in Alabama to everyone who’s 16 or older, so I signed up for the Pfizer vaccine at a site run by a local university. I know this is a political issue for a lot of people, but that honestly baffles me. We can disagree about whether such a vaccine should be mandatory — which I’m against — but as a voluntary choice, it seems like an easy choice now that it’s been safely given to millions of people. Is it a perfect preventative? Of course not. But the decision seemed obvious to me when looking at the statistics and evidence. I haven’t had any of the side effects that some people have experienced, but that’s supposed to be more of an issue after the second dose, which I’ll get on May 3. In the meantime, I’ll let you know if I grow a third arm — or if the secret microchip kicks in and someone starts trying to control me remotely. All kidding aside, getting the vaccine seems like a rational voluntary choice to me.

I get a lot of email from readers. Some of it is fascinating and useful. Some of it is full of confessions that people want to share with a stranger. Some people write to ask advice. What’s really surprising, though, is the small percentage that seems to come from mentally unbalanced people. When I started using the metaphor about being an alien — the tagline at the top of each page here — it never occurred to me that I’d start hearing from people who took it seriously. But every few months, I get a strange email — such as the one above from a few months back — from someone who seems to think I’m claiming to be an actual alien. The first time it happened, I laughed. By the time it became a semi-regular thing, I was simply appalled. For the record, I can provide no proof that I’m an alien, because … well … it’s just a metaphor. I do feel like an alien among human beings, but as far as I know, I’m just as earthbound as you are. It’s just a metaphor. Honest. Or at least, that’s what my lizard-beast overlords told me to say.

After Tampa Bay, Fla., musician Colt Clark had all of his gigs canceled last year for months on end, the entire family felt trapped at home as most of the world was on quarantine lockdown. His wife, Aubree, had an idea that would let Colt make music and involve the whole family in making music videos to share with their friends and family on Facebook. Aubree is a photographer and homeschooling mom to a daughter and two sons, who range in age from 6 to 11. After their friends started asking to share the videos, they made the performances public — and a few of them are now on YouTube, where they go by the name of Colt Clark and the Quarantine Kids. The younger son, Becket, is on drums. The older boy, Cash, plays keyboards, strings and guitars. Dad supplies lead vocals and plays guitar, while 6-year-old Bellamy mostly dances but sometimes does backup vocals. There’s even a dog who makes an occasional appearance. The Clark family has just raised the bar for what I need to create with my future children. And best of all, they seem to be having a great time together. I hope they make you as happy as they make me.

Have you ever wondered how the social media world works for so-called “influencers”? I find it comical, so I thought I’d share with you. I frequently get offers such as what I’m about to describe. And if I’m getting such offers — as a relative nobody in the online world — you can only imagine what people with huge audiences are offered. It starts with an email appealing to my ego: “We came across your online presence and we LOVE your style. We’d love to have you as one of our Brand Ambassadors. To celebrate our new [Brand Name] collection, we want to give you a FREE Watch so you can post a picture of you wearing it and drive more exposure to our brand.” Did you hear that? They love me. They want me to be seen wearing their cheap $59 watch so other people will think, “If this amazing influencer wears that, surely I should buy one.” They even offer me commissions on the watches sold from people clicking from my site. So the next time you see some alleged “influencer” touting something online or on social media, remember that this is what it’s probably all about. It’s laughable.

Modern culture is going insane. The latest evidence comes from the effort to redefine children’s author Dr. Seuss as a racist whose books should be banned. Why? Because a few images in those books don’t meet modern political standards. The drawing you see here is one of those “dangerously racist images,” and it comes from the Dr. Seuss classic, “And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street.” The book catalogs all the wild diversity seen by a child on one street, including the offending drawing of a Chinese boy. What’s racist about it? Apparently, it was racist to show the boy eating rice, wearing a funny hat, using chopsticks and (worst of all) having eyes represented by a slit. (The bearded man near him has dots for eyes, but that’s apparently OK.) In other words, the stereotypes are considered racist today. (Oddly, the culture warriors who fret over such things are never concerned if a white southerner is depicted as ignorant trash living in a trailer. Some stereotypes are great, especially if the left hates those people anyway.) Theodore Geisel — the name of the real-life Dr. Seuss — was a product of his time and nobody at that time would have seen any of this as racist. Using stereotypes and exaggerations is how artists depict differences in simple ways. You can argue that it’s better to achieve the end result in a different way, but it’s insane to pretend that everybody from the past should have his work erased because it doesn’t match the preferences of modern leftists. Unfortunately, the company that publishes Dr. Seuss books has caved to the insane people — and six of his popular works will no longer be published. The world has simply gone insane.

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