While We Change

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I did not actually grow up on a small Caterpillar bulldozer, because I did not ever actually grow up.

While Dad had been born in Norway, almost-but-not-quite in a small fishing dory, he, as a young man, did not immediately look for a job in fishing.  Like many other immigrants who crossed the whole continent before settling down, he found work in the logging industry.  Western Washington State was a logging industry.

I believe it was while he had become a drag-line operator and mechanic that he bought a small, gasoline-powered Caterpillar that had been accidentally dropped while loading it onto something.  It had a lot of worn-out and broken parts.  Somebody hauled the inert remains to the farmyard where we lived, and Dad took it apart--completely apart--and replaced most of its broken parts.

I recall, as one of the adventures of my boyhood, helping to hook Sally, our massive Percheron horse, to the stripped-down carcass of the engine block, and dragging it to a better place to begin the rebuilding.  That was the Caterpillar on which I more-or-less grew up.  I do not know how many times I had to help get the blamed crawler tractor back up on its tracks again--something was not right--before I actually was allowed to drive it myself.  Mostly, my brothers and I feared for our lives, hooking up chokers to logs while Dad pretended to be teaching us a work ethic, or maybe just the odds of being maimed or sent off to glory.

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It was something like this one, to the right; a lot like that one, winches and all.

The Caterpillar Corporation has recently opened up an office here in Tucson for its surface mining and something-engineering division, no doubt because Arizona is pockmarked with enormous open pit mines.  NASA promises that one day soon they will have the ability to get high enough and far-enough away to take panoramic pictures of our mine fields.  At first glance, from down where we can see them, they look like craters where rectangular meteorites crashed into earth, heaving up mountainous berms.

Today's Tucson newspaper, the Arizona Daily Star, has a major article about the driverless trucks Caterpillar is introducing into the surface mining business.  One of the tires on those trucks is about the same size as the little Caterpillar-That-Could that I grew up with.

In the article, Caterpillar suggests that, soon, almost all the jobs on such surface mining machines will be automated.  It is difficult, they say, to find people who can tolerate twelve hours in the seat of mining machines, being battered by tons of rock, and deafened by the noise and vibration.  Instead, operators will operate computers in a control room some distance away.

There we have it!  It is the story of how we used to work, and how the work is going to be done soon; very soon; already.  The mining will continue to be done, but the old jobs that it provided will require different skills.  Making America Great Again is not a process of doing what we used to do, the way we used to do it.  The greatness is in how we adapt; how we make it work for us.

It is the transitions that hurt people.

Farming is not what it used to be, either.  Farmers do not work the way they used to work, either.  Steel-making is not what it used to be.  There is no call for people to wear leather jackets and gloves, and pour molten iron into molds.  The production lines that Henry Ford created have precisely-controlled robots that hold the parts together and weld them exactly so.  It was politically stupid of Hillary Clinton to say so, but it was absolutely honest and accurate of her to say that a lot of Kentucky coal miners are going to be put out of work.  By machines.  By the need to reduce cost.  By machines that do not get black lung disease.  By alternative fuels.  By ways of doing things that do not pollute the air and the water with the residues and poisons of burning coal.

It is because we live in the transitions of going from an industrial age to an age in which all kinds of work will be done differently, in which pure, brute human muscle, big machines we can sit on, and even ordinary human brains have trouble comprehending, that we are scared of what the future will mean for us and our children.  Instead of honestly admitting that it is the role of us acting together in government that is needed to cope with the transitions, we just damn machines, and damn the government, and damn the torpedoes, and talk about how great it used to be.  In the coal mines.  In the steel mills.  Walking behind the horse-drawn plow.  When we knew our kids would get jobs in the automotive plant.  When we poured out sewage into the river and out through the bay.  When we spewed poisons into the air, out through a smokestack tall enough for it to blow to the next town or country, before we began to understand that the air blows all the way around and comes back from the other side to poison us.  Before we ever imagined that burning hydrocarbons would warm the atmospheres and the seas, twisting itself into hotter and more massive hurricanes.

For when the dump trucks will go down to the pits without drivers and haul giant loads of minerals up and out.

It is the transitions that we ought to think about; not how to stop them, but how to adapt, and how to be fair to those who are first hurt by change, while we change because, eventually, it will affect all of us.