Children reminding me of our true selves

When I was working I sometimes used to write stuff about things that happened on the job or in the community in which I worked. I would hand these stories out or leave them around the lunch room. I found a lost piece that I had written some years ago about some kids stopping to watch us work one day. It was a nice experience and thought I'd share it.

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I was working on a broken water main the other evening. It was a bit of a different type of job. The 8-inch cast-iron main had what we call the familiar full circle break in it. This is when the main begins to break in a circular way as opposed to a blown hole or a split; we call it a full circle break. We normally put these clamps around the main and that works for a considerable time. The difference this time was that this main had broken at a point where the main went under old railroad tracks that weren't in use anymore. We discovered this after I had already dug a fair sized hole as the tracks were under 18 inches of asphalt.

When we put a main under tracks like this we put it through a metal culvert so that if it breaks, as this one did, then the water would not shoot upwards undermining the railroad tracks but lengthwise along the culvert. You can imagine that a broken 8" main puts out a fair amount of water so it was quite a scene. We had to cut out the section of the culvert to get at the leak that was about 3 feet back from the edge of the old tracks. So we had pumps, cutting torches, machinery-----the works.

Anyway, school gets out and kids started walking by. It's a child's dream. They love this sort of stuff and, as usual, start playing boat races, putting small pieces of wood or other floatable objects in to the water flow. But there was something more exciting than that, and that was watching us work. They stood as close as we could allow them (these were kids from 10-12 I would say) and were fascinated. How do we break through the asphalt? Why did the pipe break? What sort of pipe is it? Why is the guy cutting the culvert? Is this our drinking water? Is that the sort of light that burns your eyes if you look at it? I explained that it wasn't but it was interesting that the kid knew that a welding torch can do this from a considerable distance.

It was one question after another; it just didn't stop, I was literally bombarded with them including how much we got paid. I was not operating the backhoe at the time as the guys were in the hole working on getting to the leak. First cutting the culvert with a chop saw (a gas powered saw with a carbide rotating blade) until the blade broke and then using the acetylene torch.

I snuck in to the back of the truck to get one of the 10" by 6" by 2" blocks that we use to support pipe we put in the ground. I have this trick I do with them. I split one in two evenly then hold the two halves back together tightly with my hands so that it looks like the block is still in one piece. Then when cars drive by or some women I want to impress, I lift the block up in the air, shout some Japanese sounding phrase, and head butt it with my head and the two halves fall to the ground. I then lift up my arms like the wrestlers and macho sports guys do when they've defeated their opponent and strut around a bit, swaggering.

The guys get a great laugh out of the expression on the faces of the public and the public do too when I do it a second time with the same block of wood. I did get in trouble once though as a supervisor drove by and told me not to present a bad image of the company in public. Anyway, I do my thing and the kids are aghast. But as I swagger around like the victorious wrestler with my arms in the air and head held high, some little brat says, "He didn't do that, the wood was already broken." I look around and there's this 10-year old picking up the two pieces and showing his mates how it's done.

I had to laugh. The whole experience was soul stirring. This is what we are really like. In time, much of the curiosity these youngsters displayed would be driven out of them by a system that demands conformity. Discouraged by an endless war on the mind from the TV, the priest and the stifling work environment. If they resist early, maybe they'll be diagnosed with some social malady and be handed some drugs. I thought how different this is to what I experience with many of the adults around me. It is very hard to get my co-workers to ask questions, to talk about things in the way these kids did. But we were all this way. Humans are naturally curious. Capitalism hates curiosity; capitalists are terrified of it. Today's Financial Times editorial makes the following point about economists and the inaccuracy of economic forecasting:

"Forecasters tend to move in a pack. Few enjoy life far from the consensus. Your job is safe if you are wrong alongside others. Following your convictions puts your job at risk."

Sometimes the capitalist class says it as plain as it could be said. While this applies more to a less exact science like economics, it is true for medical research, urban planning and life in any social system based on exploitation, any system in which a minority accumulates great wealth at the expense of the majority: “Don't rock the boat” is the mantra. This is why it makes us sick. The kids that night reminded me of all the things I love about humanity and all the things I hate about capitalism.

My machine is a custom built backhoe where the back section folds up on to a platform so I can drive to the next job, a truck with a backhoe on it really, different to the rubber tired Caterpillars you see, or in Britain, the JCB's or Massey Ferguson's. As I fold it up the kids look in wonder and one looks at me, eyes bright as could be and says, "Mister, that's cool, that's sooooo cool."