There’s an interesting discussion going on in the comments threads about wages, education, employment, and so forth. Several people are pointing out (correctly) that our society demeans the trades, wrongly, and discourages people who would do well in them from taking them up. A typical comment:
But beyond this, our education system demeans manual labor and respectable professions. Plumbers, electricians, machinists, etc. are all well-paid and respectable professions, but we are churning out people that lump those in with working in fast food.
This brings to mind a very interesting exchange I had last weekend in Clear Creek with a young Catholic man who had left his middle class job after his conversion and moved to rural Oklahoma to live near the abbey and be a member of the community there. To him, it was worth it. He is now working in the trades in Tulsa. I told him that I admired that, and that if any of my kids show more aptitude and interest in the trades, I will send them to trade school, not college.
The young man said that’s fine, but that I should be aware of something important: that working in the trades will bring you face to face with “some of the foulest people you can imagine.” He said the idea of the noble blue-collar worker of ages past is largely a myth today. In his line of work, he said, he spends his day with men who have drug habits, are ex-cons (some of them), are pre-occupied with pornography, see women as whores, avoid child support payments, send a steady stream of filth out of their mouths, and so forth. He also said that some of them are decent all the same. The point, said the young man, is that if you are going to encourage your believing Christian child to take up the trades, you had better prepare them for the fact that they will be entering a world of degradation.
“A lot of these [Christian] kids who have been so sheltered, they’re not going to know what hit them,” he said.
The young man said he would rather remain in that world, so that he and his wife and their kids can afford to live in the community they’ve joined, than to have what he had before. The corruption in his nice middle-class line of work was pretty bad too. He believes that all things considered, he was more in danger of losing his faith in that environment than in the one he works in now. But middle-class Christians who refuse the usual middle-class habit looking down on the trades, as correct as they are in that judgment, ought not to let their ideals fool them about what it’s like in 2016 to work as a tradesman. The moral collapse of the working class is real.
I learned something in that conversation.