I was on my way downtown when I saw them. A team of workers–their muscles rippling, their hard hats glistening, their belts lashed to a pole from which they were wiring a communications tower–actually doing something with their hands. Something specific and concrete.
This is becoming an increasingly rare sight in our economy. More common is the sight of cyber-workers at the other ends of these towers, the quick-tongued financial managers in front of their PCs, the well-groomed wheeler-dealers from the trading pits, the baby millionaires whose only contact with physical labor is probably the tennis court or that new stick-shift BMW.
What happens to a land in which a shrinking majority provides the physical wherewithal upon which a growing minority fashions today’s culture of wealth? How long can a nation hold together when the bridges between its workers and its spenders continue to crumble? When will we reach the limits of our ability to have the rest of the world produce most of our resources while we simply move their existence, location and application around on computer screens?
There may be some frightening parallels from history. In ancient Rome, the ruling classes didn’t have PCs, but they did have a vast slave class to meet their physical needs while the patrician class grew increasingly passive and indulgent. In time they simply ate and entertained themselves to death. Can that happen again?
America continues to build far more resorts than factories . . . more swimming pools and cruise ships than new schools and hospitals . . . ever larger empires of 24-hour-a-day diversions and celebrities via movie, TV and PC screens.
Beneath the glittering folds of all this pomp and circumstance may be a nation which, like the great Wizard of Oz, is more illusion than reality. Then suddenly, when asked to soar above its problems, it may say as the wizard did in his untethered balloon: “I don’t know how it works!”
Remember the John Houseman commercial in which he reports: “We make money the old-fashioned way . . . we earn it”? I’m willing to bet a lot of people believe that same way. We have to earn our way. Remember how the balloon works.
I hardly think those hard-hat workers on the tower were thinking such thoughts that morning. But I felt a surge of pride in their sweaty efforts and obvious skills. There they were, able to accomplish something with their hands that was real and not merely a flashing icon on a tiny screen.
I’m seeing fewer and fewer of those kinds of Americans.
It is a loss we may all feel some day.
