MEN ON A HOT SHINGLED ROOF

I’ve had multiple blue-collar jobs. I’ve been a garbageman, a landscaper and a janitor. I’ve moved furniture, worked in warehouses and on an assembly line. I’ve driven a truck and done construction.

Each summer I’m reminded that, in the summer of 1980, when non-Mexicans did such work, I roofed houses and businesses. Mt. St. Helen erupted that May. In the week that followed, we saw, from various roofs, multiple colorful New Jersey sunsets as atmospheric volcanic dust traversed the continent.

I’d like to tell some funny, quirky story about a roofing experience. But that job wasn’t much fun. Except for one, my six coworkers were gruff and drank a lot at night. One day, grouchy Jim showed up late, hungover and wearing sunglasses. I threw a 2 x 4 off the roof and it hit him on the head. Seeing his glaring face look up at me was kind of funny, though I guess you had to be there. Dude, you knew we were up there, ripping out old boards; show some awareness.

I guess you can’t expect guys who do work like that for years to be whimsical. You won’t see roofers do TikTok videos dancing in—and definitely not on—the workplace.

Being a roofer was the most dangerous and exacted the biggest physical toll of any work I’ve done. Nail guns had not yet been invented, or at least my boss hadn’t bought any. Lugging eighty pounds of shingles on one’s shoulders up long ladders and banging nails in 100-plus-in-the-direct-sun-all-day degrees five, nine-hour days/week wears you down and beats up your skin. I dropped to 153 pounds by summer’s end. I weigh 50 pounds more now, and I’m not overweight. I’ve had a sun-damaged patch of skin removed and maybe more to come. But I had a great tan.

On hot days or whenever I see a crew on a two-plus story roof, I think of how hard a job that is. I like hard work. But roofing is dangerous. One-hundred and twenty American roofers die each year. Fifteen thousand suffer serious injuries. I had a few occasions where a sun-softened shingle corner gave way and I spread-eagled on the rough surface to create enough friction to keep me from sliding off and going over the edge. Looking down from the tops of two and three-story houses I sometimes thought, “If I fall and survive, someone could end up feeding me and brushing my teeth for the rest of my life.”

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Peoples’ roofs wear out. You can’t allow your roof to leak for long. Leaking water damages everything below it. Ultimately, as in abandoned houses, water damage makes buildings collapse. I liked knowing that we were providing something that people needed. Roofers were essential workers before there were “essential workers.”

Most roofs are easy to replace. You can learn how on YouTube. But most won’t DIY their roofs because they reasonably fear serious injury. They hire others to internalize this risk. They also hire people to do residential or commercial construction, which injures over 200,000 American workers and kills over 1,000 annually.

People accept that some roofers and construction workers—by definition, all of vital ages—will die on the job. Nonetheless, the American public routinely exposes roofers, construction workers, fishermen, loggers, truckers, farmers and other blue-collar workers to serious injury or death. Societies need places to live and work and food to eat. Thus, without compunction, people routinely outsource dangerous work. “If it saves one life” doesn’t apply to those who do the above-listed labor. Why did people forget risk/reward analysis during Coronamania?

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No one on my roofing crew, nor any of those who do the jobs I mentioned, called himself a “hero” or posted a sign at their worksites that said, “Heroes Work Here.” These people showed up, put their lives and mobility at risk and did what was needed. Nearly all of these workers are men. Many aren’t well paid. I made $3.50/hour roofing. I could have made that much as a lifeguard but I didn’t want to sit in a chair all day. Minimum wage was $3.10. That’s like making $10/hour now. Travel nurses can make $4,000/week.

As I recently pointed out, designating medical workers as heroes was part of building the notion of the Covid response as some sort of Holy War. Those who question a response involving heroes are seen as profaning a sacred endeavor.

In the Scamdemic’s first 18 months, I scoffed at, but mostly cursed—those, like teachers, who claimed to be at serious risk from being around children. I’ll never forget that teachers refused to work during the Scamdemic. Their conduct showed their inability to analyze data and think critically and their overall lack of both toughness and concern for the students they professed to care so much about. Public school teachers closed ranks and disgracefully kept schools closed for 18 months.

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When the Scamdemicians announced their preposterous rules, they deemed “essential” those who worked in health care, food service, public transportation, warehouses and delivery. As with all Scamdemic policies, these lines were laughably arbitrary. For example, politically correct New Jersey officials initially declared construction workers non-essential unless they were building affordable housing: as if those who were doing building affordable housing wouldn’t spread whatever virus was out there but those who built market-price housing would. If Scamdemic designers had actually thought this virus was dangerous to anyone but the old and sick, public health officials were effectively saying “the essential” were “the expendable.”

Essential workers can be grateful that delineating essential from non-essential workers was just more political theater; public health bureaucrats and politicians knew The Virus wasn’t dangerous. Being around others didn’t jeopardize essential workers’ lives, though their jobs still presented the usual risks.

The “essential” were essential principally because, by doing their work, they prevented a mass rebellion. Those effecting the Scam knew that the populace would have revolted if they had to do without food, shelter and water and the electricity needed to power their computers and their TVs, ostensibly to “slow the spread” of a disingenuously overhyped virus. Peoples’ devotion to saving grandma in the nursing home quickly would have faded quickly if they had to do without creature comforts.

Meanwhile, the lying, panic-mongering/viral crushing “experts” and politicians: Neil Ferguson, Birx, Fauci, Newsom, Pelosi, Pritzker, the drug and group-sex-addled NYC “Covid czar,” et al, sneaked around socially while requiring everyone else to stay home, thereby underscoring how phony the viral threat and lockdowns were. If you bought Coronamania, you got played.

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The definition of an “essential” worker was driven by class. Throughout the Scamdemic, America was divided into two categories: those who could afford to self-isolate and were paid well to do stuff that most people could do without, cf. those who were paid less well to put on their big boy and big girl clothes, go to work and produce goods and services. About 40% of essential workers made less than $15/hour.

The contrast between the essential workers and the laptoppers showed that we weren’t “all in this together.” To non-essential workers, the mitigation came at low or no personal cost. Most of their unsupervised work lives became easier; they did less work. Those who got paid to do less or no work, saw—and still see—the Covid interventions as a minor inconvenience, a nice break from their normal lives. I knew some who relocated to their vacation homes. Or their parents’ vacation homes.

For laptoppers, the Scamdemic was also a financial/or political boon; their stocks and property values swelled, more hirable low-wage labor crossed the border, thus depressing wages, and their beloved Democrat Party made political gains via mail-in ballots. Many found it exciting to live through an imaginary crisis. They didn’t care that they were stealing irreplaceable experiences from hundreds of millions of younger, less privileged people or that all of the Covid spending was causing 20% inflation; they had enough wealth that inflation doesn’t much matter. Many young people were too naive to see the Scam and the long-term damage it would cause or were too PC/passive to speak against it.

Many of my laptop class peers look back on the lockdowns with fondness and say that those who criticize the response should move on. The laptoppers live in a bubble. They didn’t know people whose lives were wrecked by the isolation. They forgot what it was like to be a teen or twenty-something. They threw a generation of young people under the bus. This stratified state of affairs resembled the The Hunger Games, in which those in The Capital went about their sheltered lives with no concern for those in the subservient districts.

One might be tempted to think that Marx’s Class War is a fantasy. But a version of it just happened. Cloaked in fake public health concerns, the Scamdemic was a highly consequential, albeit veiled and arms-free, interclass battle. Inverting Marx, wealthy aggressors effected the biggest upward transfer of wealth ever from middle class to the rich. The bourgeoisie rose up against the proletariat. Laptoppers crushed the workers, not the virus.

Some say the lockdowns and closures were bloodless and harmless. But locking down nations and schools caused millions of people to go hungry, while millions more died of despair. There have also been hundreds of thousands of excess post-jab deaths and additionally, many more injuries.