-By Warner Todd Huston
Are girder-walking, construction workers that build America’s highest buildings wusses? Well, not exactly. But here are two photos that show how America has been wussified between the turn of the 1900s and the turn of the 2000s.
The top photo is from the early 1900s and is a shot of a crew of girder-walking, construction workers high over New York city. Notice they have no safety harnesses? Heck, some of them don’t even have shirts on!! Look at these crazy, daring, manly guys. I mean seriously. You have to admire their élan and bravery. They are lean, mean, buidling machines, aren’t they?
Now look at today’s workers doing the same job…
Fat, overweight, puffy-faced, schmoes wearing all sorts of wimpy safety gear. Harnesses, straps, hard hats, dayglow clothing… “oh, help me I’m scared to work up here. Oooo, make me feel all warm and safe inside, won’t you??”
OK, it isn’t that bad. I mean, these guys are still amazing for their intrepid jobs. I sure as hell wouldn’t be caught traipsing around on a 12 inch steel beam 40 thousand feet in the air!
And do I want to go back to the day when every job was so dangerous that you took your life in your hands every single day? No, of course not.
But, I think you see the point I was trying to make.
Look at the first photo. Now THOSE were men. Men doing dangerous work, risking life and limb to build this country from the ground up with an intrepid, derring-do spirit that made this the most powerful nation in the world. Guys like that built the Empire State Building in less than a year, DURING THE DEPRESSION, fer cripes sakes!
Today we can’t get an outhuse built in less than a year and we have to spend millions on regulatory requirements, safety harnesses, hardhats, and gobbeldegook before we slam the first shovel into the dirt.
Hell, it took us 13 years to re-build the World Trade Center!
The wussification of America has proceeded apace since the good ol’ days.
Thanks Democrats.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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