This afternoon, all Juneauites, as well as tourists visiting our capital city, are invited to gather at Marine Park to reaffirm our common commitment to America’s guiding principle — that all people, regardless of race or religion, are created equal. The gathering is in response to the neo-Nazis and white supremacists who marched through Charlottesville, Virginia two weeks ago. As we stand with unyielding opposition to their hateful and violent message, it’s important to reflect on our own inner struggles with discrimination and unjust biases.
Human equality is an idea that’s evolved many times since our nation was born. What happened in Charlottesville is but one proof that this American experiment remains imperfect. There are other unfounded assumptions we make of people unlike ourselves that, when shoved under group labels, becomes the prejudicial dividing line between all and some.
The first that comes to mind is the LGBT community. They shouldn’t have to fight for the same rights enjoyed by heterosexual Americans.
But political controversies like that doesn’t create discrimination. It’s the point where society becomes acutely aware of it. Before that, it’s usually beyond the sight of the public’s perception and out of most of our minds.
Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Arizona, brought my attention to this in opinion piece published by the New York Times last week. He told a story about Manuel Chaidez, a Mexican man without a high school diploma who worked on the Flake family ranch in Arizona for 24 years.
“In terms of material possessions, Manuel was an invisible man,” Flake recalls. “His capacity for hard, backbreaking work was his sole credential in life.”
The story is a defense of immigrants who would be denied entry to the U.S. in the merit-based system proposed by President Trump. That would give preferences to people more skilled and educated than those like Chaidez. Flake’s point of view is headlined in the article’s title. “Working Hard Is a Skill” that, when applied to manual labor, we don’t sufficiently value.
When I remove immigrants from his argument and travel back a generation, I see the image of my father. He dropped out of high school to join the army during World War II. Soon after I was born he began a 35-year career in construction, first as a general laborer and then an ironworker.
Dad’s limited education was often apparent. While he read the newspaper and watched the nightly news every day, he wasn’t much of a conversationalist. When he did talk, he often struggled to articulate his thoughts.
But dad worked full time until he was 82 years old. The last 10 of those years he bagged groceries and pushed shopping carts. That may not have required much skill, but he still worked hard enough to be recognized by Safeway’s regional management as a “great example for us all.”
That kind of work ethic didn’t come from books.
As Flake observed, there’s little in our history books about unglamorous workers like Chaidez and my dad. What’s also true is much of society’s educated class has historically treated them as inferior.
It’s been that way since at least the start of the Industrial Revolution. Wealthy business owners replaced hard working, highly respected artisans with machines and less skilled workers. The advent of the assembly line helped them save more money by hiring workers with even less skills, including children. And we’re following the same pattern again as more businesses replace human labor with robots.
The diminishing respect for talent and craft extends into the service sector. For instance, there aren’t any chefs in fast food restaurants. In some, cooks have been reduced to food handlers moving frozen food products from machines where it’s heated to customers waiting in line.
For many, higher education promised employment and a career better than these demeaning, low wage work environments. And soon enough, it began to enlarge the class divide that separated 19th century capitalists from their workers.
Education doesn’t teach anyone the ethic of hard work. It just provides a different understanding of life than what’s learned while laboring on a farm or construction site. And if the humility to acknowledge that college doesn’t make people better human beings, it’s still available to learn in school of everyday life attended by workers like Manuel Chaidez and my dad.
• Rich Moniak is a Juneau resident and retired civil engineer with more than 25 years of experience working in the public sector.
