Backsliding
In 2020 I spent most of the year during the early stages of COVID working almost every day around the hilltop with Handy Brad, fixing up everything and anything that seemed either amiss or not exactly as I wanted it. Handy Brad and I got quite close over the course of that year. He is a salt of the earth guy who is like many of the working class Americans that inhabit the majority of the country. In fact, it is estimated that 46% of the population identifies as working or lower class, so it’s more or less safe to say that Handy Brad represents more than 150 million Americans. There are 237 million eligible voters in America and 168 million of those are registered to vote. In the last presidential election 156 million Americans voted with 81.3 million having voted for Joe Biden. There were more than 16 million Americans more voting in that election than had ever voted before. One of those was Handy Brad since he told me he had never voted before and that he had, indeed, voted in 2020 for Joe Biden. I took great personal pride in helping to influence Handy Brad to finally vote for the first time in his 65-year life.
In the last few weeks I have hired Handy Brad to fix some of the loosened tiles on our hot tub. Since Handy Brad is a master stone and tile mason, that’s a very easy task for him. Today he came over to acid-wash the top surface of the tile on the tub since it had a bit of calcium buildup that detracts a bit from its best look. I had tried using indoor tile scrub solution, but all that did was set me amidst a big bubble bath and cause me to call Handy Brad for help. It’s an overcast and slightly rainy day today and after taking on a few yard and garden chores and working up a sweat, I sat on the patio and talked with Handy Brad while he scrubbed and washed the tile. In the course of that conversation, Handy Brad was his normal grumbly self. You see, Handy Brad was one of several children of a Pennsylvania couple that did not have the means to properly support their children. It seems that somewhere along the way, they had to give Brad and his brothers up to the state for adoption. Brad was raised in a series of foster homes where, as best I can tell, he was not treated particularly well. In other words, Brad’s youth was a very hard life and as he got to the age of consent it didn’t get any easier. When he was released from the foundling system at age 18, Brad’s focus was on survival and that program did not include too much about participation in the political process or anything else other than hard work. He was encouraged to take an apprenticeship in an almost medieval approach where his training was apparently less than tolerant of anything approximating any of his needs fulfillment and all about providing cheap labor to the master craftsman that was willing to employ him.
He learned several very lasting lessons which are evident in his daily work even today at the age of 67. To begin with, he never sits down to rest, almost no matter what. I sense that he was simply not allowed to do so, so even when I or all of us working together take a break and sit down, Handy Brad does not. The second is his dedication to diligence in whatever task he is undertaking. That sounds like a good thing and it is, but only to a point. They say that craftsmen measure twice and cut once. Handy Brad tends to measure 5-10 times and then cuts once with trepidation. Mistakes are not so easily ignored in his world view to be sure. But beyond that, it makes Handy Brad devoid of any willingness to take personal risks on the job. He will not make a decision and awaits direction form his master before doing most things. During the fifteen months that we worked together getting Casa Moonstruck ship shape, I feel I moved the needle on both of those fronts with Handy Brad, ever so slightly. He understood that I was more impulsive than he would ever be, and less concerned about making mistakes on projects for the sake of expediency. I’m sure I didn’t undermine his deep training, but I think I at least make him think about whether his approach was absolutely necessary at all times and to the extremes he generally tended to.
The other thing that happened over fifteen months was that I was able to talk to him little by little about what was happening in the country. With the political blank slate that he had in 2020, it was not so very challenging to make him appreciate that Trump was a bad guy who did not have his or anyone else’s best interests at heart. 2020 was less about convincing Handy Brad about the strong policy points being articulated by Biden and the democrats, and more about highlighting all the self-centered antics being orchestrated by Trump. Handy Brad had all the earmarks of a man prone to the darker side of the political spectrum, he was suspicious of professionalism, he was not a particular believer in science since he lacked the formal education to understand its foundations, and, perhaps most importantly, he had a deep distrust of the system, in general, since it had never particularly served him well either in his youth or adulthood. All that said and done, it was far easier to convince him that Trump was not out to make Handy Brad’s life better rather than to convince him that the ideology of the Democrats was more favorable to his cause. But the level of interest in the country overall in the political dichotomy combined with my daily awareness-raising discussions (always done intentionally it a very basic manner) about the importance of voting in a democracy, made Handy Brad register and ultimately vote. I have no hard and fast evidence that he did vote or that he voted for Biden, but I respectively set the odds at 95% and 80% because Handy Brad may not say much, but what he does says is pretty truthful from what I can tell.
As I sat on the patio and talked with Handy Brad, who stood in the emptied hot tub and brushed on acid wash across the top facing tiles, watching it bubble up on the areas where the calcium build-up was thickest. He would then put some elbow grease into scrubbing it with his rubber-gloved hands and move on to the next section. Then he would use his circular scrubber, a tool he said he had owned and used for thirty years, with its scouring pad to work the acid wash all across the tiles. He repeated the process several times even though he had no way of knowing if it was needed or not since the tiles all looked good when wet and would only show their film when dry. But that was Handy Brad’s diligence at play.
While he worked, we got into our old ways of me discussing the events of the day in the political world and it all being news to Handy Brad since it is not his habit to watch or read or listen to the news on any day unless it directly related to his daily activity. That’s when I heard Brad share his updated political views, which I had not heard much about since early 2021. What was clear was that he had nothing good to say about Biden, even suggesting that if he is re-elected he might move to Canada (something I knew was idle talk to be sure). When I asked why he felt that way he said that the cost of living was going up so much that he felt he might have to move to somewhere cheaper like Arizona. I reminded him that 120 degrees didn’t do much for the cost of living. He grumbled his understanding.
I told Handy Brad that he needed to spend more time with me to get his head straight before the election next year. We had a laugh about it all but that belies my concerns, less about Handy Brad and his specific vote and more about what that interaction explains about the mood of the working man in the country. I hope that the recent support for the UAW and the overall employment numbers and moderating inflation and improving infrastructure spending will work its way down into the sentiments of the common man like Handy Brad enough to counteract what I will call the other external economic forces that bear down on us all. Backsliding is normal and I do understand that the study of economics is not called “the dismal science” for no reason. I just wish the common man could weigh the bad of the moment and the bad of the opposition and come to a more complex but more rational conclusion than expressed to me by Handy Brad.