The Invisible Men

By Red Pillis

If you are like most people in our Advanced Industrial First World countries such as the US, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, or the Scandinavian countries, you probably go about your daily life never really thinking about what surrounds you. In your commute to and from work or your trips to the supermarket, shopping center, restaurant or movie theater, you probably don’t give a thought about how this all got here.

‘This all’ refers to our marvelous First World Infrastructure that we live in – the roads, streets and highways, the railroads, airports, cities, towns, water systems, power grids, food distribution systems, sewer and waste disposal systems. When you flip a light switch or turn on the tap for a glass of water or text your friends on your mobile device, you don’t give a thought about what it takes place for these miracles to happen. Nor should you. Worrying about them is not your responsibility. If it is not, then whose responsibility is it?

Answer – the Invisible Men.

Invisible Men? Who are they and why are they invisible? These men are all around you. No matter where you go or what you do, they are there. They may or may not be there at the same time you are, but the results of their work and craft are all around you 24/7. These are the men who build, maintain and enhance our First World Infrastructure and keep our highly complex and sophisticated civilization functioning.

These men build and repair almost every square inch of the ‘human’ landscape on our planet – every mine, factory, road, car, ship, boat, building, house, mall, airport, airplane, dam, power line, canal, shipping port, cell phone tower, oil rig and refinery. I could go on and on for pages, and this list would still be far from complete. The men toil in these invisible jobs day in and day out, week after week, year after year, decade after decade.

They have been doing this for thousands of years. It wasn’t the elite or the women who hauled those heavy blocks of stone to build the Pyramids or the Colosseum or Notre-Dame Cathedral. It was ordinary men toiling away year after year with little pay (if they got paid at all) or recognition. This still has not changed. Invisible Men are still out there doing the heavy, dirty, dangerous, disgusting jobs to keep our civilization running smoothly.

As I said, most of the time you don’t see them. You don’t see the electrician working to fix a high-tension power line one-hundred feet off the ground at 3:00 AM in the morning during an ice-storm in Maine. But you see the results when the lights go back on. You don’t see the iron-worker welding or riveting a steel girder into place one-thousand feet up on a new skyscraper when the wind is blowing at forty miles an hour. But you see the results when you step into the brand new corner office on the eightieth floor of that now-completed skyscraper. You don’t see the sewer worker trying to clean out the filthy, smelly, and often dangerous, muck from a blocked sewer line. But you see the results when you can finally use the toilet again.

These men do their jobs quietly without complaint so they can bring back a few dollars each pay period to keep a roof over their heads and keep their families fed, and maybe go to a movie or to their local sports bar to grab a burger and beer and watch a game once a week. For the most part, they are simple, hard-working, responsible men who take care of their families and obey the law. They don’t ask for much but give much in return.

The Invisible Men are not the well-groomed, business-suited, laptop-toting men in their air-conditioned offices and cubicles – the men who take a shower before going to work. These are the men dressed in jeans, work shirts, hard-hats and steel-toed boots who, by the end of the day are dirty, smelly and tired. These are the men who take a shower after work. (Thanks Ed Schultz)

And how does our society treat them? Like crap. How much value and recognition for their efforts do they get? Unless they are police, firefighters or soldiers, none. We give them no thought. Out of sight, out of mind. No one cares that men comprise ninety-three percent of workplace fatalities. Logger got crushed by a falling tree? Who cares? Construction worker fell to his death on the job? Who cares? Fisherman got swept off the boat during a storm in the Gulf of Alaska? Who cares? Women get backaches from sitting on chairs all day at their desk jobs? It’s a National Emergency! Quick, let’s get them thousand-dollar OHSA-approved ergonomic chairs. Poor dears, having to suffer like that. It’s outrageous.

We brand these Invisible Men as thugs, rapists, racists and sexists. They are labelled ‘The Deplorables’ and treated with contempt by the Leftist Academia, Feminists, the Main Stream Media, the Democratic Party, the SJWs and ‘progressive’ TV and talk shows. These men have been thrown under the bus and dismissed by just about everyone.

When The British Parliament got into a debate about an ‘International Men’s Day’, a feminist female MP sarcastically quipped ‘Why do we need a men’s day when every day is a men’s day’. Oh really? Tell that to the coal miner finishing his shift covered with coal dust and coughing his lungs out. Tell that to the roofer in Phoenix, AZ fixing a roof in the blazing sun on a 115 degree day in July. Tell that to the garbage men hauling off your smelly garbage and trash.

We should be honoring and praising these Invisible Men who, without complaint, do so much to keep our civilization running smoothly and who receive so little in return. The fact that we don’t tarnishes our society.

We should be ashamed of ourselves.