3221 Blue collar love

Thursday, January 6, 2011

American journalism thrives on exploring conflicts, often to the exclusion of ideas.

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When I first began working for The Company, in 1968, I lived in a 4-room log cabin in the woods, in a little depressed area called Ruby. The kind of neighborhood where there are trailers tucked into the woods, and old cars sinking into yards, and you can't see any neighbors when there are leaves on the trees. No lawns. Just mud and weed yards.

My friends thought it was a rather dangerous place for a small woman to live alone.

It turned out to be the ideal place. Half of my neighbors were nurses, state police, or city of Kingston cops, and the other half worked for the highway department. It was very safe, and when snow fell, my street was the first plowed, the most thoroughly plowed, and the most frequently plowed.

I'm finding that kind of advantage here, in my new home. The houses are small, on small lots. Very few have garages. It's definitely a lower middle class blue collar neighborhood.

But...

The fire chief lives across the street. That's got to be handy. A few highway department folks live nearby. In the last storm, this street was one of the first plowed, and after the drifting stopped, a town frontloader came through and removed not only all the snow right up to the curbs, dumping it on some town-owned land down the street, he also cleaned out the plow piles across the end of the driveways. I didn't think anything of it until I ventured out onto the "better" streets, and found snow still halfway into the street lanes and people snowed into their driveways.

Morale of the story - don't judge the liveability of a neighborhood by appearances. It's good to live near the people who work to make life liveable.

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By the way, although I have worked in white collar jobs and lived in some pretty snooty places, and many of my friends are upper crust ivy league, I freely admit I come from blue collar roots, and many of my attitudes and values are frankly blue collar. And I like it. It's a virtue.
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