A LinkedIn friend recently tagged me on a discussion that originated with another person. That person had written about tight cultures, typically blue-collar, for which people experience reverence for their crafts or trades, sometimes generational reverence, and in which people often are brought into the fold with ritual tricks and practical jokes. The author cited sending newbies out for things like left-handed screw drivers, and she offered this by way of establishing a contrasting lack of reverence for white-collar jobs:
When I train my IronWorkers … Those guys stand up and say, “I’m a fourth generation IronWorker!” I’ve yet to hear someone proudly proclaim, “I’m a fourth generation Operations Manager!”
Knowing my father’s background, my LinkedIn friend asked if that resonated with me. It did.
I came by my reverence in many ways. My reverence for the military comes from my dad's service in the Marine Corps. My reverence for any job well done comes from him, too. And I suspect I owe some of my dermic density to him, as well.
Case in point: When my younger brother, Keith, and I were about seven and six years old, respectively, our arms hurt from the booster shots we were required to get in those dark, mysterious days. We made the mistake of telling Dad about our sore arms when we were out in the front yard with him one day. He made us do pushups. His reason? “That’s what we did in the Marine Corps.” That kind of thing tends to desensitize one a tad.
My reverence for the trades comes from the two-and-a-half years I spent driving a truck for a construction company in my misspent youth. I saw and marveled at it all. As a result, Anne and I once had a young HVAC guy come to our house to do some duct work. I asked him how he got into that business. He said, "I'm a third-generation tin-knocker." I gave him a hug. He thought I was nuts. I didn't care.
While working for the construction company, I learned to send people out for left-handed monkey wrenches or buckets of steam. There's a pride in that kind of labor, in the knowledge of it, in the passing it on that will never be approximated by operations managers. I'm not sure I know why. But I know it's true.
My LinkedIn friend equated the acculturating tricks and practical jokes in the trades to hazing and wrote:
I guess that is the whole point: if we just pass hazing forward without it serving a purpose but may leave young people less inclined to stay in that line of business, would it be better to stop? I don't say it doesn't have a purpose - but I have a hard time guessing what it is. Yet, it does make for good stories in the back mirror, doesn't it? Even for the person it happened to. If they live long enough to tell about it - and only the survivors tell... And I don't mean to be overly dramatic here, but for those where something induced a great sense of shame or trauma, they are not going to share those stories at the dinner table. So we only hear from those who "had enough sense of humor".
I had to admit I’d never met anyone who was wounded forever by being sent to fetch a left-handed monkey wrench or a bucket of steam. Most folks in those kinds of jobs have thicker skin than that and aren’t prone to experiencing micro-aggressions or concocting other contemporary grievances.
“The electrician called me a picklepuss.”
I’ve a Feeling We’re Not in Kansas Anymore
In the 1970s, during my truck-driving days, I was on a job site on which one of the guys was universally hated. I don’t remember what his trade was. I do remember a bunch of the other tradesmen rigged a porta-potty with cables and waited for the guy to go in to relieve himself. The crane operator, who’d already been paid to do the deed, then hooked the cables, lifted the porta-potty in the air, and they left guy hanging up there overnight. When they let the guy down the next morning, he didn’t call a cop, a lawyer, or a therapist.
Recalling that reminds me of the chorus to a Johnny Winter song, The Golden Olden Days of Rock and Roll:
Take me back to those good old days again
When guitars were guitars and men were men.
We’re definitely not in those golden olden days anymore, of rock and roll or anything else. What happened? When did we get so soft? Why did we get so soft? Don’t we ever get tired of being offended or looking for grievances? Maybe I did a few too many pushups as a kid. I don’t know.
But I do know this: Homogenization, group identities, and identity politics are not the answers. They’re what got us here. Individuality, personal responsibility, and healthy senses of our own agency and sovereignty are the answers.
If we allow ourselves to be hurt — if we look for reasons to be hurt — we’ll be hurt. (See “Prophecies, Self-Fulfilling”) Given the perversity of human psychology, we might even be happy about it. (Every time I hear someone say, “I hate drama,” I think of the old adage, “Never believe anything until it’s officially denied.”) But if we recognize our propensities to bring things on ourselves — and if our senses of agency and sovereignty are strong and healthy enough — we’ll let shit run off our backs. And we might even derive some sympathetic understanding from the truth in the cliché, “Hurt people hurt people.”
Lest you suspect I have neither appreciation nor sympathy for depression and mental illness, please don’t.
Bottom line: If we rely solely on others for our emotional well-being, we’re in trouble.
There are books about that.