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RTWT of the Day: VIPS — The Real Very Important People in America

Who now is more important than the trucker who drives 12-hours straight to deliver toilet paper to Costco?

Or the mid-level manager of Target who calibrates supply and demand and is on the phone all day juggling deliveries before his store opens? Or the checker at the local supermarket who knows that the hundreds of customers inches away from her pose risks of infection, and yet she ensures that people walk out with food in their carts? The farmworker who is on the tractor all night to ensure that millions of carrots and lettuce don’t rot? The muddy frackers in West Texas who make it possible that natural gas reaches the home of the quarantined broker in Houston? The ER nurse on her fifth coronavirus of the day who matter-of-factly saves lives?

Do we really need to ask such questions of whether the presence of the czar for diversity and inclusion at Yale is missed as much as the often-caricatured cop on patrol at 2 a.m. in New Haven?

Do social justice student protestors who surround and heckle the politically suspicious now in ones and twos also scream in the faces of the incorrect plumber who unclogs their locked-down apartment drain?

The virus has reminded us again, but in an unorthodox fashion, that the world is bifurcated by the degreed versus the non-college educated, rural versus urban, sophisticates in opposition to supposed rubes—and the dichotomy has been telling. I don’t suppose Rick Wilson will go on CNN again to do his fake-Okie accent to ridicule the supposed unwashed, who deliver his food and energy, as viewers might wonder what exactly was his expertise.

Will multibillionaire Mike Bloomberg really convince anyone that a farmer operates by simplistic rote, and someone like himself is critical to America—one who censored the politically incorrect reporting of his own journalists while he schemed to find ways to capitalize Chinese Communist-owned companies with western currencies—at huge multi-billion-dollar profits to himself?

When your refrigerator goes out under quarantine and your supplies begin to rot, do you really need another rant from Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.)—or do you rather need a St. Michael Smith and St. Uriel Mendoza to appear out of nowhere as the archangels from Home Depot to wheel up and connect a new one?….

The Virus is Not Invisible, But It’s Exposing Who’s Irreplaceable – BY VICTOR HANSON

Comments on this entry are closed.

  • Gordon Scott March 23, 2020, 11:01 AM

    I was working on an installation in a CVS in Minneapolis the other day. The pharmacies look pretty wild, with so many people trying to get refills at the same time. Stapled bags of pill bottles are overflowing the sorting bins.

    I ordered them pizza from Domino’s, because I am an amazingly wonderful person, ahem, and because they have been working very hard, and I can afford to throw a bit of pizza their way. It made them smile. Perhaps it will help them get through the next ten people who Have To Have Their Refills Right Now No Matter What MinnCare Says.

  • jwm March 23, 2020, 11:19 AM

    I got post of the week on the local Next Door with this short comment:

    The heroes today are the most unlikely we’ve ever seen. They are the clerks at Costco, Vons, Albertsons, Northgate, and all the other markets. They are the truckers, and warehouse workers keeping the supply chains running.They never signed on to be the front-line against panic, and fear. Yet they are, this day, going to work to keep all of our lives together. God Bless all of you!

    JWM

  • jwm March 23, 2020, 11:22 AM

    One other note, Gerard.
    Lost two posts in the spam filter this Am. Both dealing with VERY unsettling stuff.
    You may want to leave them nuked…

    JWM

    [Got your back here, JWM. Just takes some time sometimes.]

  • Fletcher Christian March 23, 2020, 11:33 AM

    I hear you, but sometimes the degree matters. How about graduate engineers, geneticists, computer modelling experts and virologists? A good deal more important than those with MBAs and degrees in economics, and infinitely more important than graduates in education, philosophy, womyn’s studies…

  • James ONeil March 23, 2020, 12:55 PM

    I pretty much told my kids while raising them that our academic system in that day (& even more so today) was basically a socialization rather than an education process but that they could, with much effort, gain a rounded education within the system. I also told them over and over if they wanted to make money follow a trade, if they wanted to know how to enjoy their money and life, matriculate within the university system choosing courses that bring them as close to the old classical education as possible.

    Myself, I dropped out of college in my sophomore year and never had any regrets.

    Having said that; when my daughter was going for her engineering degree and was considering throwing in the towel after failing calculus, I challenged her to a race. I told her that I, in my forties then, would try to finish college, while still working full time, and get my bachelor’s degree before she got her’s. Parenthetical aside; (Throughout my working career, I’d take night classes, do correspondence courses, etc., many of which were applicable to a degree program even though I wan’t pursuing the parchment, just seeking the information and knowledge. I was able to get many of those courses approved when I did seek a degree.)

    End of story; I did and she did and I beat her by a smidgen. -grin-

  • talgus March 23, 2020, 1:06 PM

    the least important: everyone in Wash DC area that thinks they are important.

  • ghostsniper March 24, 2020, 4:37 AM

    Yes, yes of course. Everyone is a hero these days and everybody else knows it. I didn’t potentially contaminate anyone yesterday, I’m a HERO! Yay!!!!

    But wait a minute. I didn’t do jackshitski yesterday so now I ain’t a hero. Sad ass Panda.

    It’s hard to keep up with all this hero nonsense flying all over the place.
    One day the lowly Walmart employee sitting cans of peas on the shelf is the scorn of the community and the next day he is a hero. Just like that! (snaps fingers)

  • Brad March 24, 2020, 7:26 AM

    I love reading VDH. His analysis is spot on. I always told my kids as they were growing up that there is nothing wrong with learning a trade. Plumbers, electricians, heating and air techs will always be needed. I have seen many college grads working in low paying, unskilled labor jobs while my kids who learned how to install and repair a/c equipment, learned how to weld, gained skills working construction are thriving. All of them have more work than they can keep up with and are raising their families in their own homes.

    VDH also has a podcast.

  • John the River March 24, 2020, 9:22 AM

    Funny you should mention the refridge.

    I decided to buy a bit extra meat, just in case, and planned to store it in the deep freezer in the basement. It’s been unplugged and unused for a few years, After my mother and my aunt passed I didn’t need the extra freezer space but it’s not that old. Bought the meat, plugged it the freezer; what’s zero flashing twice and then it displays “F”. And it’s not getting cold.
    Now where the hell did I put the manual for that damn freezer?

    Anyone interested in ten pounds of corned beef brisket?