Ok that's it. I've listened to this crap long enough from Olgive and Faure.
I worked for the government, United States Forest Service, as a fire fighter
until I was 39. I don't recall feeling particularly fat or underworked
after pulling 24 or 48 hour shifts digging hand line in steep mountain
terrain, breathing smoke that seared my lungs. I was burned over once. I
don't remember feeling coddled when I wondered if that final roiling,
broiling, coppery colored cloud of dust and smoke was going to be hot enough
to kill me. I don't remember feeling particularly lazy when I was running 5
miles a day so that I could be in good enough shape to last through 45
minutes of initial attack on fires in the Sonoran Desert in the summer
before I got sick from the heat. I don't remember looking around and seeing
too many slackers on the line.
My father was a non-union carpenter in Phoenix, Arizona (a "right-to-work"
state) until the day he said piss on it, and retired at 63. He was grateful
for unions so that the wages paid to non-union carpenters would be a little
more than what they would have been had there not been unions. He worked
hard and got laid off at 55 after an idiot who had enough money to buy the
business where he worked, but not enough brains to keep it afloat ran it
into the ground. There wasn't any health insurance for him, my mom and the
4 kids still at home while he scrambled to look for work at his age. If
he'd been in a union, he'd have had health insurance. Today he'd at least
have had some protection thanks to those bleeding-heart tax-and-spend
liberals who worked for COBRA.
In 1966, when I was 18, and just out of high school, my father got me a job
working at the mobile home factory where he worked. About 2 weeks into my
new job I stuck my middle and index fingers into a radial arm saw. Most of
it was my fault, but some of it was due to an incorrectly set up saw.
Afterall, you can get a couple more inches of cutting travel if you set the
backstop back under the blade a little farther. That way you don't have to
buy a bigger saw. Think of it, I might not be able to flip off Faure and
Olgive with the short middle finger if there had been an OSHA around in
those days.
You know boys, "Survival of the fittest." has its place, but humans are
conscious beings. We can see that maybe the carnage left from laissez faire
in an industrial society may not be in the best interests of everybody, and
certainly not in the interests of those that aren't fit enough.
So, please keep your warmed over Ronald "S-head" Reagan rhetoric off a list
that's supposed to be about keeping our vehicles going down the road.
I apologize to the list for this rant, but these guys don't seem ever to get
called on this stuff.
Tom Gross
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